To Paint The Modern World, The Daredevil JMW Turner Was Willing To Do Just About Anything—Or Was He?

When the Houses of Parliament caught fire on the evening of October 16, 1834, tens of thousands of Londoners gathered to watch the conflagration from the banks of the Thames. For the painter JMW Turner, the spectacle required a better view. Renting a boat, he swiftly recorded this most newsworthy of events in his sketchbook. Back in his studio, he transformed his front-line documentation into paintings that preserved the sudden loss for all time.

This story about Turner, related nearly as often as anecdotes about him painting a sea storm while tied to the mast of a ship, depicts him as a man of action, almost a Magnum photographer working before the invention of the camera. So it seems fitting that Tate Britain would organize an exhibition titled Turner’s Modern World. Although the retrospective cannot be seen at this time due to pandemic closures in London, a comprehensive catalogue provides ample opportunity to consider Britain’s most celebrated 19th century painter through a modern lens.

Of all the canvases that Turner ever painted, arguably the most modern is a tour-de-force titled Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway, created in 1844. Depicting a train crossing a bridge on a stormy day, traveling from the outskirts of London toward Bristol at an unprecedented sixty miles per hour, the painting is as topical as the depictions of Parliament on fire: Just a few years earlier, the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel had built the bridge as part of a nationwide transition from horse-and-carriage to steam-powered locomotion.

“The world has never seen anything like this picture,” the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray wrote in a review. He was right, and not only on account of the subject. Turner had to innovate almost as much as Brunel, finding ways to show speed through perspective and color treatment.

Like Turner’s paintings of Parliament on fire, Rain, Steam, and Speed was supposedly based on eye-witness reporting. A woman named Jane O’Meara claimed to have observed Turner leaning out the window of a train car for a full ten minutes, staring into stormy weather, while the train they were riding was stopped in Bristol. O’Meara told this story to the critic John Ruskin much later, setting the scene in 1843, and alleging to have recognized Turner because of his “wonderful eyes”.

Ruskin’s own assessment neither affirmed nor dismissed this hearsay. In Modern Painters, he enlisted Turner in his rejection of classicism. “[I]f we are to do anything great, good, awful, religious, it must be got out of our own little island and out of these very times, railroads and all,” he wrote. The allegorical work of painting needed to be situated in the present. And by extension, the allegories ought to have  contemporary relevance, as Rain, Steam, and Speed undoubtedly did, showing the future overtaking the past by juxtaposing the speeding train with a horse-drawn plough in the background.

Thackeray, Ruskin, and O’Meara each vouched for Turner’s modernism in different terms, and modern critics and scholars have added still more into the mix. For instance in a 1966 critical biography of Turner, the writer Jack Lindsay claimed that the “Parliament works allowed him to express to the full his liking for dramatic contrasts of warm and cold colours, the reds and oranges of the flapping flags of flame and the quiet blues of the sky”. Lords and Commons be damned, Lindsay’s Turner viewed the world as an abstract artist avant la lettre.

Turner’s Modern World does not present a unified vision of modernism. Turner is shown to have painted modern subjects using modern compositional techniques and visual effects to communicate modern ideas, though none of these are shown consistently in his work for the simple reason that Turner wasn’t consistent.

Even the story of renting a boat on the Thames turns out not to be so straightforward. Scholars have subsequently shown that the perspectives from which he depicted Parliament on fire are suspiciously similar to those seen in lithographs by other artists. Turner might never have seen the fire for himself, depending instead on a bit of postmodern appropriation, more than a century-and-a-half before Photoshop was invented.

In Turner’s Modern World, we see a painter who seems to have been primed to create his work by any means necessary. This artistic pragmatism might be his most modern trait.