The man who painted weather
Britain answered the temperament two opposite ways, and the wilder of the two was J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851). Turner began as a brilliant, conventional landscape painter and spent fifty years dissolving that training, pushing paint until the solid world melted into light, steam, and weather. Late Turner barely has edges. A ship, a sun, a storm: all of it goes soupy and luminous, the subject half-drowned in atmosphere, the picture coming closer to abstraction than anything in Europe would manage again for sixty years. He was painting the sublime directly, nature’s overwhelming power, and discovering that the best way to paint something overwhelming is to let it overwhelm the picture too.
Sail handed to steam
Some of it is elegy. The Fighting Temeraire (1839) shows HMS Temeraire, a great warship that had fought at Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames at sunset to be broken up for scrap.
The old ship rises pale and golden and almost ghostly, all tall masts and last dignity, dragged along by a squat, dark, business-like steam tug coughing black smoke into the gold. Turner stages it against one of his great sunsets, so the scene reads at once as a thing happening on a river and as a thing happening to a century: the age of sail handed over to the age of steam, beauty towed off by the machine. He never sold it. He called it his “darling.”
A sunset over a crime
The most unsettling of them looks, at first glance, like pure color. The Slave Ship (1840) is a blaze of blood-red and gold, a violent sunset over a heaving sea, with a ship driven off toward the back and a storm (a “Typhon,” in the period spelling) coming on. Then you read the foreground.
Down in the water, half-swallowed by the spray, are shackled human legs and reaching hands, with fish gathering. Turner’s full title names the subject: Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying. The picture is built on a real and specific horror, the 1781 massacre aboard a British slave ship called the Zong, whose crew threw roughly 132 enslaved Africans overboard alive so the owners could claim insurance on them as “cargo” lost at sea. Turner exhibited it in 1840, the year the World Anti-Slavery Convention met in London, and he had likely been reading the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson’s history of the slave trade. Britain had abolished slavery in its empire only seven years before, and the Atlantic trade was still being fought over. This is a painting made against the slave trade, by a man who turned the full force of his sunset on a crime. The beauty is not decoration laid over the horror. It is the same paint.
The machine, painted as weather
By 1844 Turner could take the newest, hardest, most modern thing in Britain, the railway, and turn even that to vapor. Rain, Steam and Speed sends a Great Western Railway locomotive hurtling across Brunel’s new bridge at Maidenhead through a storm of golden mist, the black engine the one near-solid thing in a picture otherwise made entirely of weather. The most up-to-date machine in the country, painted as a kind of charging cloud.
Turner himself supplied the legend that goes with all this weather. About a storm picture from 1842, he told friends that he had had himself lashed to a ship’s mast for four hours so he could watch the blizzard and live to paint it. It is a wonderful story and almost certainly not true: no records confirm the steamer he named ever sailed that night, and the tale comes from Turner and no one else. He liked people to believe he had stared the sublime in the face. Whether he was strapped to a mast or warm in his studio, the pictures look the same, which is the point. He had found a way to make paint behave like weather, and after him a landscape no longer had to hold still.