JMW Turner: life of the week

Summary

Podcast Summary: History Extra Podcast – "JMW Turner: Life of the Week"

Introduction

In the August 4, 2025 episode of the History Extra podcast titled "JMW Turner: Life of the Week," host Spencer Mizzen engages in an enlightening conversation with Nicola Morby, an esteemed art historian and curator specializing in 19th and early 20th-century British arts. The episode delves deep into the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Joseph Mallord William Turner, one of Britain's most celebrated artists. Turner’s prominence was recently immortalized by being chosen to feature on the British £20 note—a testament to his lasting impact on British culture and art.

Early Life and Artistic Beginnings (02:00 – 04:56)

Nicola Morby begins by providing a concise overview of Turner's early life. Born in London in 1775, Turner hailed from modest beginnings; his father was a barber and wig maker. Despite financial constraints, Turner's prodigious talent in art became evident at a young age. At merely 12 years old, his father showcased his watercolors in their Covent Garden shop window, recognizing art as a pathway to upward mobility for the family. By age 14, Turner had already secured admission to the prestigious Royal Academy in London, a remarkable achievement given that most students joined at older ages with more advanced training. Morby emphasizes, “his innate skills were really exceptional” (03:27).

Rise at the Royal Academy (04:56 – 09:14)

Turner’s entry into the Royal Academy marked the beginning of a transformative era in British art. The Academy, a relatively young institution at the time, aimed to centralize and formalize art education with royal support. Turner’s acceptance was a testament to his extraordinary talent, as he began exhibiting at the Royal Academy at just 15 years old. His ascent was swift; by 27, he became a full Royal Academician, the youngest ever to achieve this status. However, his social background and Cockney accent subjected him to prejudice and criticism regarding his manners and commercial interests. Additionally, his focus on landscape painting—a genre considered lesser compared to history paintings and grand portraits—set him apart from his contemporaries (06:55).

Artistic Style and Romanticism (09:14 – 17:20)

When discussing Turner's artistic style, Morby highlights his alignment with Romanticism, a movement emphasizing individual experience and the profound impact of nature on the human condition. Turner’s work is characterized by his obsession with light and its transformative effects. His style was notably dynamic, constantly evolving throughout his career, which showcased his versatility and willingness to experiment. Morby elaborates, “he never settles into one particular way of working” (10:15).

Turner’s masterpieces, such as "The Fighting Temeraire," "Snowstorm, Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth," and his series of watercolors depicting Lake Lucerne’s Rigi Mountain, exemplify his genius. "The Fighting Temeraire," often voted the nation's favorite painting, symbolizes the transition from the age of sail to the industrial era, capturing both nostalgia and progress (11:38). "Snowstorm" showcases his ability to convey intense natural phenomena, pushing the boundaries of traditional art and paving the way for modern and abstract movements. His watercolors, particularly the Rigi series, demonstrate his delicate use of color and light, contrasting sharply with his more dramatic oil paintings (16:38).

Personal Life and Character (20:42 – 28:52)

Turner was a complex individual, often perceived as gruff and reclusive. Despite his reputation for being a "curmudgeon," Morby shares anecdotes that reveal his generous and loyal nature. For instance, Turner’s friendship with architect Sir John Soane, whom he supported during personal tragedies, highlights his compassionate side. Turner was also intellectually curious, delving into various subjects such as science, geology, and mathematics to inform his art. His peers, including John Constable, recognized his vast intellect and versatility. Morby notes, “he is intensely loyal to the profession of artists and to the Royal Academy” (21:10).

Relationship with Constable (24:27 – 28:41)

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around Turner’s relationship with fellow Romantic painter John Constable. While often depicted as rivals, especially in popular portrayals like the Mike Leigh film "Mr. Turner," Morby argues that their relationship was more nuanced. Both artists were landscape specialists but approached the genre differently—Constable with personal, intimate landscapes of Suffolk, and Turner with expansive, dramatic vistas across Britain and Europe. An infamous anecdote from the film, where Turner allegedly paints a small red boy on Constable’s work, symbolizes a supposed rivalry. However, Morby suggests that such incidents might have been gestures of camaraderie rather than genuine antagonism, emphasizing that Turner’s reputation was secure enough to diminish any need for rivalry (25:11).

Success and Fame (28:41 – 34:27)

Turner enjoyed considerable fame and commercial success during his lifetime. He adeptly balanced catering to high-end patrons, such as the aristocracy and wealthy landowners, while also appealing to the broader public through engravings and book illustrations for authors like Lord Byron and Walter Scott. This dual approach ensured his widespread recognition across different societal levels. Despite his success, Turner had a complex relationship with the British royal family—they never fully embraced him, as evidenced by his exclusion from the Royal Collection and the absence of honors such as knighthood. Nonetheless, Turner formed meaningful connections with European royalty, including a friendship with Louis Philippe I, King of the French (31:10).

Legacy and Influence (34:28 – End)

Turner’s influence extends far beyond his lifetime, serving as a cornerstone for both historical and contemporary art. Institutions like the Turner Contemporary in Margate and the prestigious Turner Prize highlight his lasting legacy. He is celebrated for his radical experimentation and ability to challenge and redefine artistic norms, inspiring movements such as Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism. Turner's work also resonates with modern themes like climate change and post-colonialism, making his art relevant to current societal issues. Morby asserts, “he remains a touchstone for contemporary practitioners today” (34:28). His placement on the £20 note further cements his status as an iconic figure in British culture. When asked about his ranking among British painters, Morby confidently states, “he really is... the jewel in the crown at Tate” (36:10), affirming Turner’s position as the summit of British art.

Conclusion

The episode "JMW Turner: Life of the Week" offers a comprehensive and engaging exploration of Turner’s life, artistry, and enduring legacy. Through Nicola Morby’s insightful analysis, listeners gain a deeper appreciation for Turner’s contributions to Romanticism, his complex personal character, and his pivotal role in shaping the trajectory of British and global art. Turner's ability to capture the sublime beauty of nature and his relentless pursuit of artistic innovation continue to inspire and influence generations of artists and art enthusiasts alike.

Transcript

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[Spencer Mizzen]

Hello and welcome to Life of the Week, where leading historians delve into the lives of some of history's most intriguing and significant figures. From ancient Egyptian pharaohs and medieval warriors to daring 20th century spies. In 2015, the bank of England asked the British public to nominate a deceased cultural figure the they felt deserved the honour of appearing on a banknote. The figure they chose was Joseph Mallard, William Turner. So what made Turner such an extraordinary artist? And why do his landscape paintings still resonate today, 250 years on from his birth? Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizzen, Nicola Morby explores the man behind the breathtaking works of art.

[Advertiser 2]

Nicola, can you start by giving our listeners a quick introduction to JMW Turner? Who was he, in a nutshell?

[Nicola Morby]

JMW Turner, Joseph Mallard, William Turner. I mean, I think quite simply, he is one of Britain's greatest artists, if not the greatest. And his career stretched from the end of the 18th century up to the middle of the 19th century. And during that time, he put British arts on the map, specifically through painting landscapes. So the idea was that anything that he had to say was done through using landscape. All the important themes and issues of the day, meditations upon the past and historical events, but also things that were happening now in real time. Fascination with scientific knowledge, but also the very sort of deeply personal individual experience of being alive. What that meant was reflected through the land, the sea, the sky and the phenomena of the natural world. And in doing so, he really ended up painting some of the most beautiful, bewitching, challenging and memorable paintings ever made.

[Advertiser 2]

So can you tell us a little bit about his early life? At what point did it become obvious that he had this kind of, like, special talent for art?

[Nicola Morby]

Yes. Well, Turner was born in London in 1775, and actually he didn't have the easiest childhood and didn't really come from beginnings where you might naturally assume he would go on to become this, this great man, this great artist. His father was a barber, a wig maker, and so the family was quite low income. This was a skilled trade, but really they're at the sort of the top end of the working classes. And his father had a shop in Covent Garden and it seems to have been very early on that he realized that his son had this prodigious artistic talent. And so sort of one of the first ways that manifested was aged about 12 years old or something, he would put his son's watercolors on display in his shop window and he would charge his customers one shilling to look at them. And from there, I think he determined that actually this was a path through which the family could have great upwards mobility. So he really supported the young Turner, supplied him with drawing lessons and so on. So that aged just 14, Turner joined the prestigious schools of the Royal Academy in London. And that was really, really young. People generally joined a lot older. They were expected to arrive with their artistic training already well advanced. So it shows that Turner's, you know, innate skills were really exceptional and he'd already reached a very high level of drawing and ability.

[Advertiser 2]

So can you tell us a little bit more about the Royal Academy? Because, like you said, I mean, this is a really important and well respected institution.

[Nicola Morby]

So the Academy at this time dominated the art world to an extent which is much greater than any other institution before or since, really, in Britain. It was still a relatively young institution in Britain. It had only been set up at the end of the 18th century, but at the time when Turner was born, it had just moved into new premises on the Strand, Somerset House, which is a former Royal palace. So now they had up to date state of the art venue for exhibiting, for their offices and for teaching. And it was the first kind of centralized, formalised art education with support from, you know, royal endorsement from, from the highest levels. And it's all about an ambitious project to really put art front and centre at the national agenda and to encourage the British school to step out and to be unique and relevant in a way that was perhaps different from what was going on elsewhere in Europe. So Turner joins us. A very important, transformative and exciting moment and it was run on a meritocratic system. So you didn't have to have money necessarily to go. What you had to do was to prove that you had the ability and then the commitment. But having said that, of course, if you were from a lower income background, to be able to reach that level of artistic excellence would not have necessarily been so easy to do. And I think most of the people that have joined would have come from a higher social class than Turner.

[Advertiser 2]

So what did the other artists at the Academy make of Turner when he was accepted into the Academy? He was obviously a lot younger than a lot of them, not from maybe quite as exalted a background. What reception did they give him?

[Nicola Morby]

So Turner was immediately understood to be something quite extraordinary. I mean, he began exhibiting at the Royal Academy. He was only 15, the first time that a painting of his was accepted. And to begin with, you had to go through a sort of a blind audition. So that was a real endorsement of how exceptional he was. And his rise to the sort of highest levels was absolutely meteoric. So people started talking about him very quickly and recognized that, particularly in the field of watercolor, he was an outstanding. He was really somebody to be watched. He was doing things that were already equalling what the masters of the past had achieved and was now taking the medium in very exciting new directions. This meant that eventually he became an Associate of the Royal Academy at a young age and a full Royal Academician at the youngest age ever, just 27 years old. So that really was an exceptional achievement. What did happen is, because I think of his sort of rather lowly social background, the way he sounded, he spoke with, you know, quite a pronounced London Cockney accent. Maybe because he didn't have the kind of social polish to his manners and the education that a lot of them did. He did come in for some prejudice. And people often talked about his manners being, you know, not very polished and a bit rough. And he also was accused of being sort of a bit too interested in money, which wasn't quite the thing. You know, if you're a gentleman, you're not supposed to worry about that sort of thing. And Turner was always someone who was very commercially driven, was very aware of market forces and, you know, he didn't have any money to fall back on, of course, any money that he was coming his way, he was earning himself. So quite understandable things. But that was the sort of prejudice that he was up against. Plus he was choosing to specialize in the field of landscape, which at the time was considered a lesser genre. Really, it was history paintings and the big portraits or subjects in a more sort of revered tradition that would have been prioritised by his peers at the Royal Academy. So to be doing this in landscape, he set himself quite a difficult task.

[Advertiser 2]

So let's talk about his painting in a bit more detail, then. So he's widely described as an English romantic painter. I mean, for those of our listeners who aren't experts in art history, what exactly does that mean?

[Nicola Morby]

Yes, Romanticism is quite a difficult concept, not just to understand, but actually to explain. But really, it's the idea about the individual experience. So about somebody going out into the world and the effect that the experience of being in nature, being amidst dramatic landscapes or being witness to particular light effects or weather phenomena, what that means to the individual and how that can be used to explore and describe quite profound notions of the human condition.

[Advertiser 2]

So how would you describe his style? I mean, what made him such a brilliant artist?

[Nicola Morby]

Yes, well, one of the things to say about Turner's style is that actually it changes constantly. And what makes him such a brilliant artist is the sheer variety and versatility across his career. So that the paintings he produced at the beginning are actually quite stylistically different to those that he was painting at the end. He was always growing and experimenting and challenging himself. Never settles into one particular way of working. But there are certain themes that run throughout his life. One of the most notable is his interest in the effects of light. Whether that's sunrise or sunset or moonlight. It's about the transformative effects of light, how that changes allocation and how the light can be used to tell a story or to set an emotional mood. So he's always wrestling with this understanding of what light is, how we experience it and how to paint it, how really to make his paint behave as though it is light. That's kind of one of the key quests of Turner's life, and it is almost an obsession, really.

[Advertiser 2]

Which paintings do you rate as his greatest? And I wonder if you could maybe select three artworks that really capture his genius.

[Nicola Morby]

Yes, I mean, that's probably one of the most hardest questions to answer, to narrow Turner's achievements down to just three paintings. But if I was to choose, I'd probably have to pick three, which are actually from the later part of his career, which are the ones that people tend to think of when they think of Turner, stylistically very sort of loose and hazy and full of brilliant colour. The first one would have to be the Fighting Temeraire, which is, you know, famously been voted the nation's favourite painting. And it's the one which most people know, even if they don't, they're not particularly interested in art or art history. A lot of people are familiar with this painting and it's actually one that's quite visually easy to read. Turner's pictures could often be very complicated and sort of difficult to understand. But the visuals of it are of a great warship, a battleship known as the Temeraire, who was a veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar. She played a key role in Nelson's victory at that famous battle. And in 1838, she was brought up the Thames. She was tugged by a steamboat, a modern industrial age steamship, to be taken to a breaker's yard in Rotherhithe on the Thames in order to be destroyed, to be broken up. And Turner visualises this moment of the old Temeraire with the sun either rising or setting behind her, and there's a stark contrast between her sort of ghostly beauty with her sails and her mast and everything, and then the stark blackness of the steamship. And of course, it's a comment on old and new. And we've got the sun setting on the last hours of the Temeraire, bidding farewell to this age of sail. But the sun is also rising on the new industrial era, the Industrial Revolution, of which Britain was, was a world leader, a world pioneer. So it's a typically Turnerian comment upon the inevitability of transition and the fact that one age will give way to another. And just as the sun rises and sets, so too shall all things come to an end and be replaced by something else. And so it's a very patriotic and evocative and emotional painting. But interestingly, Turner doesn't encourage us to say that this progress, this modernity, is something to be regretted. He's just saying this is how it is. It's an absolute knockout of a picture, and I think that's one of the reasons it's remained such a popular one for the nation. It brings an awful lot into quite a simple visual. Another painting that I would have to go for is one called Snowstorm, Steamboat of A Harbour's Mouth, which was exhibited in 1842 and can now be found at Tate Britain. And this too, uses a steam right at the heart of a composition. And this steamboat is caught in the most extraordinary storm. You can hardly tell where the sea begins and the sky begins. It's a sort of a huge swirling vortex. And what Turner was trying to do is capture that experience of actually being out in a storm with the wind and the spray and the snow and the rain lashing at your face and actually make that visible through the way that he applied the paint. And at the time, this was sort of breaking all the rules of what art was and people didn't like it at all because they couldn't actually see what was going on. They. They thought it was that Turner hadn't just hadn't bothered to finish the picture or that somehow he was sort of offending them deliberately by painting in this manner. But of course, it became really such a beacon for modern and contemporary artists who understood what Turner was trying to do. And it's seen as a sort of a huge leap forward in terms of less expressing about a picture, about narrative and what the picture is and more about the way it was painted becoming important. So it's sort of a stepping stone towards later movements like abstraction. And then the third picture, I would have to go for not an oil painting, actually, but a watercolour, because Turner, for me was. Was the greatest watercolourist that has ever been. And actually, I think probably he painted oils for publicity and for public acclaim, but I think at heart he was really a watercolourist. And some of his late watercolours from the 1840s which depict places in Switzerland. I think one of his favourite places in the world was Lake Lucerne and he made a famous series called the Rigi. And they all show the profile of the Rigi mountain on Lake Lucerne, coloured by different lights of day. And the blue Rigi is about sunrise and it's just the most exquisite picture. The use of watercolour is delicate, the colours are pure and vibrant. It's hazy and really, you just. The mind boggles as to how Turner has managed to do it. And in sharp contrast to Snowstorm, Steamboat of a Harbour's Mouth, which is all about the drama and the intensity and the noise and the sort of perils and dangers of the sea. This is tranquil and calm and harmonious and just the use of paint to describe the light is just absolutely pitch perfect.

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[Advertiser 2]

The classics play quite an important role in his work, don't they? What drove his interest in these two topics?

[Nicola Morby]

Yeah, so we often think of Turner as being an artist who's driving towards the future, but actually a lot of his career was founded upon looking back to the past. And I think, you know, it's fair to say he was a very ambitious and competitive painter. And one of the ways that he really placed modern landscape upon a secure foundation was showing how it related to the great painters in the Western tradition of art history. So at some point Turner kind of does almost pastiches or versions of some of the great painters, looking back to people like Rembrandt or Raphael, the French painter, Claude Lorraine or Watteau or Poussin. Really anyone who is anyone. Turner does a modern landscape version in his own style based upon that person. And it's a way of making British landscape and British landscape vision relevant for a modern audience, showing its kind of intellectual credentials, couching it in a language that the sort of culturati would understand at the time, and also just bringing himself up amongst these giants of Western art. But it enabled him to use landscape to explore quite intellectual ideas. He looks at subjects from the Bible or from literature or from Shakespeare or from classical mythology. And so he uses landscape as a way to explore historical epic ideas.

[Advertiser 2]

Now what kind of person was he? What did people who crossed his path say and write about him? Because I've watched the Mike Lee film Mr. Turner, and he comes across in that as being quite, I guess, a bit gruff and curmudgeoning. Is that an accurate description?

[Nicola Morby]

Yes. I mean, like you, I saw the Film as well. And I thought Timothy Spall did an absolutely wonderful job of capturing Turner, as we understand. But the problem is with Turner that even during his own lifetime, he was a bit of a mystery, really. He liked to be very private, very secretive, and kept his personal life hidden away from his professional existence. And because he didn't leave behind diaries or there are letters, but they're sort of relatively few, so the biographical information about him is actually quite sparse and we end up hanging on little bits of fragments or trying to intuit things about him from his art, which means that he is this mysterious figure that we're always trying to know better and get to the heart of. As you say, he did have a reputation for being curmudgeonly and difficult, and that may have been because he wasn't someone who articulated himself verbally or in a written way terribly clearly and he didn't have that gentlemanly sort of demeanour that a lot of his colleagues would have had. So he came in for criticism. But a lot of other people who knew him well also commented on the fact that he could be a wonderful friend. He was incredibly tactful, he never said anything bad about anybody else, particularly his peers at the Royal Academy. He was somebody. He was intensely loyal to the profession of artists and to the Royal Academy. And if you were one of the favoured 40, the number of Royal Academicians is set at 40. That was really akin to being a brother to you as far as Turner was concerned. So he's very careful not to say things about other people. And he could be very kind and generous and there are some really lovely stories to sort of provide evidence of that. And one of my favorites is the architect Sir John Soane, who was the designer of the bank of England the year that he lost his wife. It was Turner who went along and spent Christmas Eve with him. And he later came across a portrait drawing of Soanes's wife that was being sold in a studio sale and he bought it up and sent it round to Soane with a really sweet message on it. And those sorts of gestures, you know, really speak to somebody who, you know, has a huge, huge amount of heart. I think the other thing to say about him is that he is incredibly intellectually curious. So Turner is a man who's interested in absolutely everything. And despite his relative lack of formal education, he clearly was clever enough that he was able to dig into different subjects to quite a profound extent through his own sort of self directed learning, through acquiring books and getting to know other people. So he's interested in science, he's interested in colour theory and geology and chemistry, mathematics and perspective. He reads widely and sometimes he might get things wrong within his paintings, but he's always drawing in a huge array of different types of subjects. And again, another beautiful thing that was said about him, John Constable, after sitting next to him at dinner one night, said that Turner has a wonderful range of mind and that's absolutely on the nail.

[Advertiser 2]

Okay, so you just mentioned Constable there. Can we talk about Turner's relationship with Constable? Because Constable was, am I right in saying, the other great romantic painter of the late 18th and early 19th century. And as you've just alluded to there, their paths obviously crossed on many occasions. Now I'm going to go back to the Mike Lee film Mr. Turner because there was this quite famous scene in which Turner angers Constable by painting a small red boy on one of his own paintings, which was displayed next to Constable as the opening of Waterloo Bridge. Can you tell us a little bit about that incident and why it's kind of become quite famous and yeah, just sort of dig into their rivalry a little bit, please.

[Nicola Morby]

Yes, so you're absolutely right. John Constable is the other really well known British artist and it just so happened that he was born about 14 months after Turner. So the two of them are working at the same time, both in the field of landscape. But Constable is like this sort of the opposite side of the coin from Turner. They were personally very, very different characters. And Constable focuses on a particular kind of landscape. He always has to have a very personal connection to anywhere that he paints. And he really famously paints the landscapes of Suffolk where he grew up, because he's interested in what that meant to him about his secure and happy childhood. And he paints sort of very close up views of riverbanks by the River Stour. Unlike Turner, who sort of paints anything and everything, past, present and future all across Britain and Europe. So it's a sort of, you know, very, very sharp contrast between the sort of micro and macro approach to landscape. And yes, they absolutely knew one another. And their relationship has often been portrayed in the past as a rivalry. And that was brought out so brilliantly in the Mike Leaf film with this sort of high moment of drama. It was sort of like a Western cowboy showdown at high noon with these high jinks that would go on at the exhibition at the Royal Academy where painters would interfere perhaps with one another's paintings. And it's that whole episode has been read as though Turner was trying to get one over on Constable because They were sort of deadly, deadly rivals and were trying to outdo one another. And there certainly is a sense that there was a level of competition. I mean, I said Turner is a very competitive artist. So the minute Constable began to become a name, and particularly as a landscape specialist, it was inevitable that Turner was going to sort of note what he was doing and perhaps, you know, up his game, step up to meet that challenge. And Constable certainly was aware of Turner. You couldn't be a landscape painter and not know who Turner was. And I think for quite a long time, because fame came quite late to him, he was quite jealous of Turner and was deliberately sort of trying to carve himself out a little niche that was distinct from he who would be Lord. Overall, that's what Constable liked to call Turner. But actually, I do think that their relationship is something which has been spun. I think at the time people liked to compare them. And so I think this notion of rivalry has been twisted and constructed just to sort of ramp up the excitement. And there is a sense that I mentioned the fact that Turner was always very loyal to the Royal Academy, and particularly once John Constable became a Royal Academician, he was a brother labourer, is what Turner would have said about him. And actually that moment of painting, a blob on his painting to sort of spark off something that Constable had done may well have just been a sort of moment of camaraderie, a sort of little gesture of comradeship and friendship, sort of in house banter at the Royal Academy. And I think when you look at the context of that account, I think that it's very plausible to read it that way. And at the end of the day, Turner was so successful, he really didn't need to worry about what Constable was doing. His reputation was perfectly secure.

[Advertiser 2]

You say he was obviously extraordinarily successful. I mean, how famous was Turner in his lifetime and how did he deal with the fame that came towards him?

[Nicola Morby]

So Turner was always successful, he was always famous. You know, you don't become the youngest ever Royal Academician without sort of making a big splash publicly. And he also was commercially very successful. So the kind of high end aristocrats, the landed gentry, the really important wealthy people, were buying his oil paintings. But Turner also was very clever at diversifying his practice and pitching to a much lower end of the market, so that he also became a household name because he would do things like produce watercolors that were engraved. Much cheaper to collect an engraving than to buy a sort of a real painting. And he provided book illustrations for some of the great authors of the day, people like Lord Byron and Walter Scott. And so this sort of thing meant that Turner's art, his images and his name were extremely well known across different levels of society. And even when he begins to alienate himself from a sort of a mainstream audience, the fact that the papers are talking about him and are saying, you know, quite extraordinary things about what he was doing, why he was painting and the way he was, they loved to jump on the fact that he loved yellow, he loved a particular pigment called chrome yellow. And all sorts of extraordinary things were said about him, like he was eating too much curry or that he had jaundice of the retina, sort of really highly inflated, exaggerated language. But that meant that he was in the public consciousness, he was, he was making a splash. And I'm sure at times he found some of this criticism difficult to deal with. You know, they're like the sort of 19th century trolls of the day. There's some of this criticism, but he is driven to, to follow his path and paint how he wants to. And also he's now financially secure enough that he is able to do that without sort of taking an economic hit.

[Advertiser 2]

And I've read an anecdote of Louis Philippe I, King of the French, presenting him with a gold snuffbox. This is a guy who's grabbed the attention of European royalty.

[Nicola Morby]

Yes. So he is able to meet with and socialize with people who are much higher above him socially. Some of the great sort of landowners of the time, Lord Egremont at Petworth House and Walter F Fox at Finley hall in Yorkshire. Very wealthy, well connected people. And Turner was very welcome in their houses and they went out fishing together. It's really, you know, quite sweet. And Louis Philippe ended up living near Turner in Twickenham. He was a neighbour because he was exiled from France and ended up near to where Turner had built himself a house in Twickenham. And they became quite good friends. The one patron, I have to say, who always eluded Turner was the British royal family. Despite some fairly, not very subtle attempts to gain their attention, Turner paints a huge painting of the view from Richmond Hill on the Prince Regent's birthday. So the Prince Regent and his sort of friends are having a picnic and that was quite clearly pitched towards trying to get him to buy it. And later he also paints the home of Prince Albert of Saxe Coburg Gotha. Again, not very, not very subtle, but either they just didn't like him as an individual, he just wasn't quite the thing, or they just Couldn't understand his painting style. So no painting by Turner entered the Royal Collection. And he also was never knighted, which is sort of one of the travesties of his career when many other less well known names today did indeed receive that honour.

[Advertiser 2]

What do you think he'd make of the fact that he now appears on the 20 pound note, you know, some 150 years after his death?

[Nicola Morby]

I know, it's brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant, isn't it? He's the first artist to appear as the face of a British banknote. I think he would be astonished. Particularly one of the things which he always said was that nobody seeing his face would believe that he could paint such pictures because he was a bit of an odd looking, an odd looking character. And that portrait, which is believed to be a self portrait, was about the only time that he ever went through such a process and it was when he was very young. And in later life the way he looked lent itself much more to caricature actually, than to a sort of portrait painting. So I think he'd be astonished that he was actually on the face of a banknote, but I think he would be completely thrilled and delighted with this mission to put landscape front and centre in British art, to be there as the sort of the business card of the nation with the Fighting Temeraire, as this image of stability and continuity and regeneration, of resilience, all the sort of ideas which are encapsulated in the bank of England, actually, all of that. He'd be absolutely thrilled. Of course he would.

[Advertiser 2]

If you could sum up the influence he had on future generations of British artists just in a few sentences, I mean, what would you say? What was that influence?

[Nicola Morby]

So Turner is an artist who remains a touchstone for contemporary practitioners today. And of course, if we think about two of the kind of concrete examples of that, we have Turner contemporary contemporary art space in Margate, which was somewhere that he was associated with, and we have the Turner Prize, the most high profile prize given to contemporary British artists. So he's become a sort of a beacon for radical experimentation, for rule breaking, for challenging what art means to Britain as a nation. And you know, that prize would make no sense, called the Constable Prize, for example, or any other artist from that time. So that really is the way that his legacy has evolved. And the thing about Turner is that he remains so relevant for any of the issues which we face today as a society. There's something in Turner's work that speaks to that. So at the moment he's sort of held up as, as Someone who's very interested for people working around climate change and the impact of human presence within the environment, or the way that we're trying to come to terms with a post colonial world. And particularly black and Caribbean artists look to Turner's depictions of the sea and also his own connections with slavery in the past and how that's intertwined within the 19th century art world. And they use him as a sort of a leaping off point to explore those theories.

[Advertiser 2]

And finally, I'm going to put you on the spot a bit here by asking him, where do you think he ranks in the sort of the pantheon of great British painters?

[Nicola Morby]

I think as far as Britain is concerned, he is the top, he is the summit. And, you know, we see that in the way that he is quoted within popular culture. But he is one of the few British artists who has an international presence. He's one of the few that's known throughout the world and it has been important for successive developments not just in Britain, but across the world. So the Impressionists looked at Turner in the 60s, the American Abstract expressionist painters looked at Turner. And so it goes on. So, yeah, he's up there. He really is. I mean, the fact that he is the sort of the jewel in the crown at Tate, the national collection of British art, he's always going to be top dog, I think.

[Spencer Mizzen]

That was Nicola Morby, an art historian and curator specializing in British arts of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her latest book, Turner and Constable, is published by Yale. She was speaking to Spencer Mizzen. Thanks for listening to today's Life of the Week. Be sure to join us again next week. Time to learn about another fascinating figure from the past.