J.M.W. Turner in 6 Paintings: Light as Subject

Turner painted light. Not the things light touches — though things were there, ships and trains and slave traders and storm-blasted Highland caves — but the light itself, and what air does to it, and what fire and steam and water do to it when they are doing it at the limit of what a human eye can hold.

He died in 1851 leaving the contents of his studio to the British nation: nearly thirty thousand watercolours and drawings, three hundred oil paintings, his own theory of colour, his own quarrel with the past. Six paintings can stand in for the whole career — and they do not stand still.

1. The Fighting Temeraire (1839) — A Warship in a Sunset

A small black steam tug pulls a giant ghost-white sailing warship across calm water at dusk. The Temeraire fought at Trafalgar in 1805 — she helped sink Napoleon's fleet. Thirty-four years later she was being towed up the Thames to be broken up for scrap timber. The painting is her funeral.

Turner makes the steam tug small and dirty and necessary. He makes the warship enormous and pale and finished. He places the sunset on the right edge and lets the sky burn. The painting is what the end of an empire looks like when you are inside the empire and you can see it.

It was voted the greatest painting in Britain in a national poll in 2005. Turner kept it for himself for the rest of his life and refused to sell.

2. Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) — Painting What's Not Yet Possible to See

A black engine surges out of yellow weather across the Maidenhead Railway Bridge. There is a hare running ahead of it in the lower-right — most viewers don't notice the hare for years. The bridge is a real one. The train is a real one. The weather is, on Turner's word, the weather of a specific day he stood with his head out the window of a Great Western carriage in heavy rain.

The painting is what visual modernity feels like in 1844, the year that the rail map of England was being drawn faster than mapmakers could redraw the country. Steam was three years old as a serious force. Turner is the painter who first looked at a steam locomotive and decided it was a subject for the highest art.

3. The Slave Ship (1840) — A Moral Painting Disguised as Weather

A storm-flecked sea, a golden sky, a distant ship with sails braced for the gale. In the foreground floats a single chained leg, picked at by fish. The painting documents — and Turner subtitled it precisely — the 1781 Zong massacre, in which a slave-ship captain threw 133 enslaved Africans overboard so the cargo could be insurance-claimed.

It hung at the Royal Academy beside Rain Steam and Speed in successive seasons. John Ruskin, then twenty-one, called it "the noblest sea Turner has ever painted." The English market refused to buy it. It was eventually sold to an American collector who paid more than Turner ever made from a single canvas in his lifetime.

4. Sun Rising through Vapour (1809) — The Early Move

Dawn on the Suffolk coast. Fishermen unload the night's catch. A low sun rises into a soft yellow haze that erases the horizon line entirely. The water is silver. The sand is silver. The boats are silhouettes.

This is Turner at thirty-four, having looked at Claude Lorrain's Italian sunrises for ten years and decided to do the same thing on the English coast — to dissolve the world into morning vapour and let the sun be the only thing solid. The painting marks the moment Turner stopped imitating the past and started inventing what would come.

5. Dido Building Carthage (1815) — The Rival Sunrise

Turner painted Dido Building Carthage as an explicit challenge to Claude Lorrain. He believed himself the equal of the seventeenth-century master who set the standard for sunlit harbour scenes, and he wanted the world to see them side by side. In his will he stipulated that this painting must hang permanently next to Claude's Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba in the national collection.

It still does. Turner won the argument by writing the contract into his estate.

6. Staffa, Fingal's Cave (1832) — A Painting Made by Weather

A Hebridean storm. A small steam vessel pitching at the entrance to a basalt sea cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa, off the west coast of Scotland. Turner was on the boat. He had crossed from Oban in heavy weather to see the cave that Mendelssohn had heard sing three years earlier.

The painting is what he saw through driving spray. The cave is a black slash. The sky is the storm. The steamer is a brave gesture. The painting was the first he sold to America — a Boston collector bought it in 1845 and shipped it across the Atlantic. Turner wrote that he hoped the picture would survive the crossing better than its painter would have.

How to Live With a Turner

A Turner is an event on a wall. The colour is louder than the room, the weather is wetter than the air, the horizon is further away than the building it hangs in. Give a Turner space and morning light. Don't crowd him with other paintings. The fight he picked with Claude Lorrain — that one canvas should be enough — is the same fight he picks with the room you put him in.

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