Blog Review of Mr. Turner

J.M.W. Turner is my favourite British artist. I have admired the passion and chaos in his portrayals of landscape, climate, weather and the changing environment. My favourite work being The Eruption of the Soufrière Mountains in the Island of St Vincent  (1812).

                     

What I love about this picture is the way it depicts the power of the natural atrocity of a volcano eruption; a stark sky filled with swirling clouds of smoke and the raging lava belching from the mouth of volcano skywards into the heavens. It is also reminiscent of the fire of the Industrial Revolution growing in Britain during the late eighteenth-century and in the nineteenth-century. The use of darkness in the picture creates a rather bleak and unwelcoming vision and there was growing discomfort from many artists during the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries about the consequences of the industrialisation of Britain for the everyday life of the rural poor. The poet, William Blake, was a contemporary of Turner albeit being born twenty years before Turner and dying twenty years before Turner also, is most famous for expressing his concerns about the Industrial Revolution in his poem, The Tyger.

 

THE TYGER (1794)

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

 

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the opening stanza, it is possible to see Blake’s concerns about the effect on the countryside of the increasing number of large mills and factories being built. Blake’s fear for Britain’s changing landscape is revealed clearly in the line “burning bright / In the forests of the night”. Some of this love and passion to conserve Britain is what I was most expecting to see from the people surrounding Turner when I attended the cinema last week. Turner was excited by the possibilities of the future, the excitement of the new technology and the discoveries made possible by science.

 

Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844)

This attitude giving him the reputation of being somewhat of a maverick, a rebel against the artistic styling of the day. But this is not quite what I got. Whilst there is a lot of attention paid to Turner’s immense talent, the film more closely follows the last 25 years of Turner’s life before concluding with his death. However, one of the scenes I most enjoyed was a visit Mary Somerville, the renowned nineteenth-century female scientist, pays to Turner and she conducts a scientific experiment using a spectrum to filter light. This scene amongst the frequent tableaux of the real life sources of inspiration for a number of Turner’s most famous pieces of work are as close as Leigh gets to examining Turner’s work. But this is not a bad thing. Instead, this is a very human portrayal of the artist who is revered as one of the greatest British artists of all time. Mike Leigh provides amusing insights behind the closed doors of the Royal Academy, not only making Turner jump into real life, but artists like Benjamin Haydon and John Constable too. Leigh’s depiction of a young John Ruskin was also extremely amusing. An entertainingly superior Ruskin was played masterfully by Joshua McGuire.  But Timothy Spall is truly the Master of this film (pun intended!). He grunts, groans, splutters, coughs and wheezes, gropes and fumbles, splashes and stabs at his paints in the most unexpectedly bestial personification of the world renowned artist. It is no wonder that Spall won the 2014 Cannes Film Award for Best Actor. He must have lived, slept and breathed this role for a year to create such a vivid portrayal of the man behind the paints. In addition, Turner’s affection for his father against his sometime brusque and overly hard behaviour to the other people as close to him, such as Sarah Danby (supposedly with whom he had two daughters) and his housekeeper, is both touchingly poignant and uncomfortably close. However, we warm to Turner further as he slowly opens up to people after his father’s death. This is shown most touchingly in Margate where he meets Mrs Booth, the woman he eventually spends the rest of his life with incognito and in whose arms he dies muttering the words “The Sun is God”.

 

Finally, this is definitely a film to watch in the cinema, do not wait for it to come out on DVD or on the television. The use of landscape and light, which is to be expected of the artist known as “the painter of light”, is magnificent and is definitely best appreciated on the big screen.