The Patriot: Turner and the drama of history.

Poor old Turner: one minute the critics were singing his praises, the next they were berating him for being senile or infantile, or both. No great painter suffered as much from excesses of adulation and execration, sometimes for the same painting. “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On” had, on its appearance at the Royal Academy, in 1840, been mocked by the reviewers as “the contents of a spittoon,” a “gross outrage to nature,” and so on. The critic of the Times thought the seven pictures—including “Slavers”—that Turner sent to the Royal Academy that year were such “detestable absurdities” that “it is surprising the [selection] committee have suffered their walls to be disgraced with the dotage of his experiments.” John Ruskin, who had been given “Slavers” by his father and had appointed himself Turner’s paladin, not only went overboard in praise of his hero but drowned in the ocean of his own hyperbole. In the first edition of “Modern Painters” (1843), Ruskin, then all of twenty-four, sternly informed the hacks that “their duty is not to pronounce opinions upon the work of a man who has walked with nature threescore years; but to impress upon the public the respect with which they [the works] are to be received.”

The reasons for both the sanctification and the denunciation were more or less the same: Turner’s preference for poetic atmospherics over narrative clarity, his infatuation with the operation of light rather than with the objects it illuminated. His love affair with gauzy obscurity, his resistance to customary definitions of contour and line, his shameless rejoicing in the mucky density of oils or in the wayward leaks and bleeds of watercolors—these were condemned as reprehensible self-indulgence. Sir George Beaumont, collector, patron, and, as he supposed, arbiter of British taste, complained noisily of Turner’s “vicious practice” and dismissed his handling of the paint surface as “comparatively, blots.” The caustic essayist William Hazlitt was especially troubled by Turner’s relish of visual ambiguity: the sharp line melting into the swimming ether. Contrary to Ruskin, Hazlitt thought it was unseemly for Turner to fancy himself playing God, reprising the primordial flux of Creation. Someone, Hazlitt commented, had said that his landscapes “were pictures of nothing and very like.”

But that is precisely what we do like, do we not? Turner’s art of conjuring something from nothing, and then (unlike God) having the temerity to deposit the working trace of that mysterious process on the canvas, has made him a paragon for modernists. He seems to have understood picturing as a collaborative process between the artist’s hand and the beholder’s eye, in which the former laid down suggestive elements and the imaginative observer assembled them in his mind to make a coherent subject. Sometimes he would help the process along, sometimes not. But he was much taken by the indeterminacy of the exercise, by forms that escaped resolution. The sobriety of the hard edge became, one has to think, a sign of conceptual banality, a weakness in the mind’s eye. For him the purest form, and one that he repeatedly returned to, was also the most naturally unstable: the rainbow.

Taken to task by an American buyer for the indistinctness of the very beautiful 1832 painting “Staffa, Fingal’s Cave”—Hebridean cliffs veiled by streaming rain and sea spray—Turner, through an intermediary, begged the American’s pardon, for “indistinctness is my fault.” But, as that vice turned—for his modernist apostles—into a virtue, the script changed, and Turner was apocryphally made over into the defiant independent who had wanted the American to know that “indistinctness is my forte.”

It’s often said that Turner had only two true subjects: the anatomy of light and what Ruskin nicely called the “palpitating” vitality of paint itself. His learned preoccupation with optics, the struggles to analyze and represent the diffusion of light, fathered a poetry of radiance and grandfathers him into the ancestry of Impressionism; his emotively weighty manipulation of pigment did the same for Expressionism. So it is the Turners that most affronted the stuffy Victorians, mired as they were in anecdotal sentimentality and ponderous literalism, with which we most easily identify: pictures big with prophetic courage, the inkling of an alternative life for paint. With Turner, so this story goes, the story doesn’t matter; it’s the opera of the drenching colors, the unloosed play of the brush, the gouge of his untrimmed thumbnail scoring a groove through the sticky pigment— that’s his claim to immortality. Why should he give a fig about all those gods and heroes and Scriptures and battles?

Except that he did, obstinately and passionately, as the National Gallery’s show, opening in October, blazingly demonstrates. The procession of phenomenal narrative pictures that constitute its core makes it clear that we do Turner no favors by pinning the tinny little medal of First Modernist on him. Subject matter meant a great deal to him, and if claiming him for the poetry or the physics of light blinds us to the seriousness with which he yearned to be Britain’s first great history painter, he would not have thanked us. What, I believe, he wanted us to see was that, as far as the monumental oils were concerned, all his radical formal experimentation—the trowellings and the “mortary” quality of the paint surface that his critics complained of, the scrapings and rubbings and stainings—was at the service of those grand narratives. It’s correct to think of light as his subject, but when he was most ambitious light was a protagonist in an epic narrative of creation and destruction—an Anglo-Zoroastrian burnout.

“Regulus,” for example, tells a gruesome tale probably drawn from Oliver Goldsmith’s “Roman History,” which Turner had in his library. The tragic hero Marcus Atilius Regulus was a Roman consul-general who, captured by the Carthaginians in the First Punic War, was released on parole and sent home to persuade his countrymen to sue for peace. Instead, Regulus urged the Senate to fight on, but, being an honorable gent, returned to Carthage to face the music. To punish him for violating their trust, his captors cut off his eyelids and stood him in the noon sun to go blind. Then they locked him in a barrel with the nails pointing inward to finish the job.

Turner originally painted the picture in 1828 in Rome, where he took a lot of abuse for histories in which you couldn’t make head or tail of the action. Stung by the criticism, Turner shelved the painting until, nine years later, he sent it to the winter show of the British Institution, in Pall Mall. There, according to contemporary witnesses, he confounded his peers by coating the picture with lumps of flake-white: “He had two or three biggish hog [bristle] tools to work with and with these he was driving the white into all the hollows, and every part of the surface. This was the only work he did, and it was the finishing stroke.” At the end of the attack, the sun, a fellow-Academician reported, was a protruding disk of pigment like a “boss on a shield.” Even though the white has yellowed somewhat, we can still see this intervention as an enactment of what happened to Regulus: the scalding of the retina, the light that switches off vision—whiteout. Viewers complained that Regulus was nowhere to be found, but although there is a characteristically perverse miniature figure that might conceivably answer to the tragic hero, it’s more likely that Turner simply virtualized him into the murderous glare. That heavy-handed business with the white pigment wasn’t just a proto-Expressionist performance but a calculated fit between manner and matter.

For Turner, light was not just the enabler of vision. Especially in his histories, he conceived of it as a dramatic actor: the vehicle of emotive as well as optical illumination; the agency of romantic disorientation or, in its absence, the demon of eclipse. And all these states of vision were personal and local, the spectacles of his own story. For Turner, the ultimate subject was always the history of Britain, and he felt that subject in his marrow. Yes, he travelled, relentlessly. Yes, there was Venice and Mt. Cenis, and the Loire and the Alps, the Rhine and the Rhône and the Seine. But he always came home; at heart he was a self-conscious British patriot and, more than that, a Londoner, born and bred a five-minute walk from the Thames.

He was born on St. George’s Day, April 23rd, celebrated as the birthday of both Shakespeare and the Prince of Wales. It was the spring of 1775, the week of the “shot heard round the world” at Lexington green. So he came to maturity when Britain, shaken by the American debacle, turned to territorial memory for a romantically reinvented bond of nationhood. Geography was history and history was destiny. The young Turner, tramping the countryside in the seventeen-nineties, often sketched or painted in watercolors Gothic ruins or vaults where balladeers imagined ancient canticles being moaned in the moonbeams, mossy limestone crypts housing the sleep of ancestors: Ewenny Priory, Tintern Abbey, Stonehenge. The Napoleonic Wars triggered a burst of antiquarianism; greaves and helmets long rusted shut were extracted from dung-floored barns, given a lick of grease and polish, and reassembled to stand guard in the manorial hall.

Commercially astute, Turner knew that there was a ready market for this fabulous junk, but, in any case, he loved it himself. When, in 1802, it was time for a submission that would mark his acceptance as a full member of the Royal Academy, he offered a bardic romance: Dolbadern Castle, in Wales, the prison of the Welsh prince Owain ap Gruffydd, who had been locked up by his brother Llywelyn. The ruin was just a plain circular tower squatting on a modest hillock, but Turner gave it the full Romantic treatment, upping the altitude, lowering the point of view, backlighting the tower, and setting it on a plinth of rock, crowned with scudding clouds. As in “Regulus,” the tragic hero of Dolbadern became virtualized, personified this time in craggy stone, not blinding light. Turner was interested not in the deeds of the heroes but, rather, in the ways in which their memory might be visually transmitted to posterity. It was as though mere flesh and blood, however handsomely booted and spurred, weren’t quite sufficient, and neither was the art that purported to celebrate them—better to embody them in rocks and ruins.

His approach to war, too, was radically unheroic. The norm for battle pieces was to memorialize the genius of command and the gallantry of the ranks. Turner had tried this, in 1800, with an innocuous version of the battle of Seringapatam, in southern India, where serried lines of scarlet coats advance on the distant citadel of the Sultan of Mysore. But what he really liked, in common with much of the British public, was a good disaster. Around 1805, a series of calamities—the Plagues of Egypt, the destruction of Sodom, shipwrecks, the panic-stricken and the prostrate—begin to populate his large dark, thunderstruck canvases. In all these gloomy efforts, the human figures are limp, almost invertebrate, their faces summarized in a few caricatural strokes and their bodies weirdly attenuated, as if in a new Mannerism. Turner was not, as sometimes charged, an incompetent figure painter. He had spent years in academic drawing and in his early career had produced conventionally modelled studies. But when it came to the big oils he chose to stylize them, as if in self-conscious repudiation of the classical tradition. (And here it does seem legitimate to see that rejection inaugurating something that would end up with Matisse’s “La Danse” or “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”) For Turner, the distortions were the agents of narrative: the representation of the figure as victim, the disarticulated plaything of history’s mischief.

In the case of the spectacular action painting “The Battle of Trafalgar,” Turner did his homework, going to Sheerness to see the hulk of Nelson’s flagship, H.M.S. Victory, and carefully sketching its splintered beams. But he threw the research away to compose, in 1806, an astounding enactment of the chaos of war at sea, using a viewpoint high up in the mizzenmast shrouds, where, although ostensibly on the British man-of-war, the beholder can as easily imagine himself in the roost of the French sharpshooter who kills Nelson. The entanglement of the ships of the line, like so many lumbering dinosaurs locked in belligerent slaughter, is described through an inchoate massing of sails, each impossible to connect to any vessel in particular. It’s a maritime traffic jam, a smoke-choked pileup with nowhere to go, no visible stretch of sea! And, in case people weren’t already confused, Turner made matters worse by collapsing two discrete consecutive episodes into one: the French surrender, indicated by the tricolor laid on the deck of Nelson’s flagship, and the canonical climax of Trafalgar, Nelson dying, stretched out amid the huddle of his grieving officers. Victory’s victory becomes Pyrrhic, the tragedy embittering the triumph.

The Duke of Wellington fared no better than Nelson. In 1817, Turner, after visiting the site of the bloody victory over Napoleon, at Waterloo, chose instead to paint the harrowing aftermath: a nocturnal carpet of corpses lit by the sulfurous glare of a rocket, with grieving wives and sweethearts, some of them carrying infants, searching desperately through the human debris. It is a return to the distraught Niobes of the Greeks, the wailing woman as personification of calamity.

Tragic poundings—fires that cleansed, extinctions that were the prelude to rebirths—became the great theme of Turner’s mature epics. It was as though the life cycle of the man born on Shakespeare’s birthday were an emblem of England’s own fate: history written on the body. Turner was tormented by asthmatic wheezes and joint pains, for which he took the narcotic herb thorn apple (consumed daily through the goop that accumulated in the bowl of his pipe). As middle age advanced, he felt a steady drumbeat of decease, the winnowing of those closest to him. In 1825, his patron and first great collector, the Yorkshireman Walter Fawkes, radical in politics and hospitable in character, died in debt; then, in 1829, Old Dad, whom the son had shamelessly exploited as factotum and workhorse but who had also been his bosom friend; then the heavily landed connoisseur and collector (of women as well as of pictures) George Wyndham, the Third Earl of Egremont, who, after Fawkes’s death, had made Turner his house artist, giving him lodging and studio space. In return, he painted, rather ambiguously, a series of glimmering rectangular views of house and park and some of the Earl’s business enterprises—such as the Chichester Canal and the Brighton Chain Pier—designed to be set in the panelled walls of the dining room. Two of those paintings Turner elongated, the fish-eye vision emptying the frame and lending the space a sombre fatefulness. The canal is aligned ninety degrees to the picture plane, and, on it, a little man hunched in a coat, a battered hat on his head, sits in a rowboat fishing—one of Turner’s favorite pursuits—as a black-sailed brig moves ominously toward us, an allegorical self-portrait smuggled into the commission. A note of elegy seems to hang over Turner’s work for Egremont. After going to the Earl’s funeral, in 1837, he painted one of the house’s great rooms in wild disarray, as if the aristocratic world the Earl embodied had been attacked by an invasion of light.

Such alterations exercised the most strenuous minds of early Victorian Britain. Many of them, like the architect A. W. N. Pugin and Thomas Carlyle, eulogized what they imagined to be a lost, devotional, architecturally Perpendicular, Christian Albion and waxed wrathful about the materialist hell of the Age of Machinery, with its philistine utilitarianism and worship of what Ruskin, the sherry merchant’s son, called, contemptuously, “the goddess of Getting-On.” In an implausible overreading of “The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides,” Ruskin recruited Turner as an anti-capitalist, but the truth is that his mills were usually neither dark nor satanic. His sketch of the town of Dudley, made around 1830, when the possibility of an English revolution hung in the air along with bituminous fumes, gives obvious prominence to the emblems of an older world—church and castle barely holding their own amid the chimneys. Consuming fires, Turner seems to have thought, were just the medium through which the country had to pass to come to a new national life.

When the Houses of Parliament caught fire, on the night of October 16, 1834, Turner, along with a throng of fellow-Londoners, rushed to see the spectacular inferno. Hiring a boat, he bobbed back and forth, riding the tide, at Westminster Bridge. There had been no foul play, but, since a Parliamentary-reform act had been passed just two years before, amid loudly voiced fears that, unless it was legislated, the kingdom might, like France in 1830, go down in bloody revolution, the relationship between rulers and ruled was in perilous play. A dominating feature of the two “Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons” paintings that resulted—one now in Cleveland and one in Philadelphia—is the crowds jamming the embankment and Westminster Bridge, watching, fixedly, the cremation of “Old Corruption.”

This is another authentic first—the painting of the People. Turner was putting on canvas Burke’s definition of representative government as a contract between the past and the present. The past is embodied, as if in a Gothic allegory, in the spectacle of the purifying inferno. In the Philadelphia painting, Turner has augmented this feeling of a political altarpiece by turning Westminster Bridge into a structure that seems cut from alabaster rather than limestone, and appears to liquefy into the flame-tinted water at its far end. But the two pictures also look forward to the great issue of the nineteenth century: the test of popular legitimacy. In the Cleveland painting (the two are united in the National Gallery show), Turner broadens the river so that he can give prominence to the rapt masses in the foreground, dramatizing their distance from the burning palace of Westminster. One figure, enigmatically, holds up a sign that reads, simply, “NO.” This does not make Turner some sort of socialist. It is still Britain, and auspicious unrevolutionary stars are twinkling above the Thames. But the poetics of power did absorb him. And although we often think of Turner as the lyricist of the empty landscape, the truth is that the other Turner, the denizen of the London alleys and pubs, was truly Hogarth’s heir, with an unerring instinct for the crowd as social animal.

Every so often, that public-minded, historically fretful Turner thought that Britain should confront ugly truths. The doomed “Slavers” was conceived in just such a proselytizing spirit and timed for 1840, the year an abolitionist congress was to be convened in London. But Turner’s ambition for a history painting that would achieve, through the medium of marine catastrophe, a moral reckoning had been rehearsed around 1835.

He was, once again, playing with fire, and although that 1835 picture is in a radically incomplete state, it’s the skeleton of a masterpiece. Flecked with gobs of phosphorescent cinders raining down from the sky into a storm-churned sea, the huge composition was traditionally given the title “Fire at Sea.” For years, it was underrated and underread as a rough sketch. It is in the National Gallery show, where visitors will find it described as “Disaster at Sea,” which is right but not right enough. Fifteen years ago, the scholar Cecilia Powell recognized that the work depicted an actual calamity, or, rather, a crime: the sinking of the Amphitrite, in September, 1833. Powell made one simple, vital connection that hadn’t been noticed before: the frantic figures wrapped about the broken mast and fallen spars of the rapidly sinking wreck are all women and small children. The Amphitrite was a convict ship transporting female prisoners and their infants to the penal settlement in New South Wales. Driven off course by a storm in the Channel, it ran aground near Boulogne and began to break up. It was close enough for appalled French witnesses to offer assistance, but the captain, evidently a stickler for the rulebook, declined, on the ground that he had no authority to land his charges anywhere but their antipodean prison. He battened down the hatches to prevent just such an escape. In desperation, the women broke through, but to no avail. Though one Frenchman actually swam out to the ship with a line, all of the more than a hundred women and children drowned. Three crew survived.

The atrocity was widely reported in the press. Ballads were written and sung about it. Turner could not possibly have missed it, and he responded with a painting of timeless tragic power: the “Guernica” of nineteenth-century British art. The bodies are a curling ribbon of writhing, pathetic, naked women, arms flung out to the babes who slip from them into the sea for which—in the transparent film of water washing over a spar—the painter deployed all the prodigious gifts of the illusionism he was thought to have abandoned for poetically pretentious freedom. Turner’s bodies are already bobbing flotsam. They are helpless, ugly, manic, and they tear us apart. Our mere witness seems to implicate us in the enormity of the cruelty, the proper effect of all great histories from Caravaggio to Picasso. The pity of the thing is relentless, because of the phenomenal coherence of Turner’s draftsmanship, the violence of the storm, and the desperation of the victims—who should be flying away, centrifugally, but instead are sucked into the whorl of the merciless elements.

We’ll never know why Turner never finished or exhibited the painting. Perhaps he did finish it and this is it. At any rate, the Amphitrite was among the three hundred or so oils left in his studio when he died, in 1851, and so it was included in his bequest to the nation. Turner was the first painter in the history of art to give his work to the public, rather than to a church or a patron—and this, too, speaks to the intensity of his devotion to the cultural life of the British people. Ruskin was at least right about that.

In the century and a half since Turner was buried, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, the British have loved him with a grateful ardor that has nothing to do with his place in the genealogy of modernism and everything to do with the poetic visualization of their history. The year before last, BBC’s Radio 4 asked listeners to vote for the greatest painting—from anywhere in the world, any time. The hot candidate was, unsurprisingly, Constable’s “Haywain,” that cart-horse idyll by a plashy stream that seems to preserve the English countryside, in all its cow-parsley, humming-bee, “Wind in the Willows” summery splendor forever and ever amen. But the winner was Turner’s “The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up” (1838), a painting not about the embalming of the British past but about its unsentimental coupling with the future.

Although the sky over the Thames is saturated with a nectarine sunset that seems to mourn the passing of the timber veteran of Trafalgar, reduced to a pallid phantom (Turner, as always, taking liberties), its masts and furled sails are restored as it is tugged to Beatson’s breakers yard, at Rotherhithe. Thackeray, who adored the painting, assumed that Turner had cast the tugboat as the gnomic villain of the piece, dragging the valetudinarian to its last indignity. But Turner—especially in his own last years—was not at all hostile to the incoming empire of technology. Quite the opposite: he believed that the speeding train or the chugging paddle steamer could be turned into a visual lyric that married time with motion. For that matter, since the two vessels are sailing upstream, and thus westward, the vermillion sky behind them, in the east, may actually be a sunrise, a fanfare for the future, not a dirge for the past. That’s the wonderful thing about being British: you can never really tell which is which. ♦