Turner had a mentor, who painted contemporary arts, including industry and battles. His name was Philipe James de Loutherbourg.

Take a look in all details of this Turner’s watercolour depicting Wolverhampton annual July Fair – a small town two hours from London. The scene is filled with incident, including theatre, waxworks, wild animals, food and drink vendors. 

And about this impressive one, when in January 1792 the 16-year-old Turner witnessed the fire which destroyed the Pantheon Opera House on London’s Oxford Street. 

Turner depicts industry helped support Britain’s role in the French Revolutionary Wars. Like this watercolours shows workers forgin cannon in a foundry.

The exhibition is organised in 8 rooms. In the third one, we can tell how the theme of war and peace affects Turner’s work. He seized the opportunities the wars gave him as a painter of modern history. He depicts conflicts that took place as far afield as Egypt and India, and British Victories in the Napoleonic Wars such as the Battle of Trafalgar, which took place in Spanish Water in 1805.

The Battle of Waterloo on 18th of June 1815 saw Britain and Prussia defeat France, ending the Napoleonic Wars. Turner visited the site in 1817. He fills a sketchbook with drawings, took notes from guides, and read Byron’s verses on Waterloo, adapting them for his pictures.

Turner lived through an intensely literary age. His poems, book illustrations and collaborations with poets, writers, and publishers reflected his modern interests. He saw painting and poetry as complimentary. He exhibited pictures with fragments of his own poems or quotations from other authors. 

Byron was Turner’s favourite modern poet. He illustrated Byron’s Life and Works for the publisher John Morray and painted six pictures citing Byron’s long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, like this one, illustrating the city of Venice, where the poet lived. 

Britain was at war for most of the first hall of Turner’s life. His paintings and watercolours of this time show an awareness of how Britain and its population were affected by overseas conflict. They include pictures of coastal defences against a feared French invasion. But also the setting of rural labourers against the background of Windsor castle, hints the vast inequalities in British society. 

Slavery was a major part of the British economy. By the start of the nineteenth century, it’s estimated that Britain had transported 3.1 million people from Africa to the British colonies in the Caribbean, North and South America and other countries. 

The personal fortunes of some of Turner’s early patrons came from slavery. Turner also sought to benefit from it: in 1805 he invested 100 pounds in a proposed cattle farm in Jamaica to be worked by enslaved people. 

Other patrons were opponents to the slave trade, lke Turner’s closest friend Walter Fawkes. Perhaps with Fawke’s encouragement, by the later 1820s, Turner had converted to the cause of Abolition.

Turner wasn’t  an overtly political artist, but he became increasingly liberal during his lifetime. His works contain more references to progressive causes than any other painter of his time, including freedom of expression, religious toleration and the abolition of slavery. 

Steam power was the most modern feature of Turner’s lifetime. It was used in industry during the eighteenth century and applied to locomotion in the nineteenth. Steam reduced journey times at home and to mainland Europe. Steamboat became common in British water in the 1820s. Turner used them regularly and often painted them. 

Like here, in this artwork, tower of London

Or in this watercolour named Dover: in the centre, a packed modern steamship charts its course under mechanised power. 

Turner was the first artist to bring “railway mania” into the arena of academic oil painting with this picture of the Great Western Railway. 

The subject matter of many works from the final years of his career shows Turner’s continued interest in modern life. In addition to paintings of steam technology, he mediated on the legacy of Napoleon’s rise and fall. 

By the end of his career, modernity was not limited to Turner’s subject matter, it had also transformed his style and practice. And probably he contributed not only to the formation of new painters, but also to the configuration of a freer society as we have today.

Visit the Exhibition:
Tate Britain, London, Until 12th September 2021

Watch here a special video-report that our editor-in-chief Victor Drummond has prepared to you! Just slide down or click in this link!