There are two Turners. One of them is public property, a national treasure whose face we put on our banknotes and whose ship paintings we habitually place at the top of our lists of favourite pictures. He is the Turner whose anniversaries we celebrate officially and whose quarter millennial appearance in our midst we are now toasting. Happy 250th birthday, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), Britain’s greatest artist.
Turner number two is a different kettle of octopuses. He too is an artist, but one who is cussed and ungovernable, weird and creepy, unbalanced to the verge of madness. He is supposed to be English, but he paints like a demented German, high on mountain schnapps. He is supposed to be a landscape artist, but when you peer into one of his late fogs all you see is swirls of watery abstraction, vomits of fiery paleness that might pass for something unshiftably abstract by Mark Rothko. Indeed, they are among the chief reasons why Rothko became Rothko.
I tend to think of Turner Two as a mother’s boy. His mother, Mary Marshall, came from a family of butchers and was nearly ten years older than her husband when she gave birth to little William Mallord, on April 23, 250 years ago. Mallord was a variation of the family name Mallard. At some point one of his ancestors chose to appear less duck-like.
Mary Marshall was angry, impatient, violent and after the early death of a daughter, Turner’s sister Mary Ann, just before her fifth birthday in 1783, her fragile mental health began an unstoppable decline. In 1799 she was sent to St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, where they branded her “incurable”. In 1800 she was transferred to the notorious Bethlem — the original Bedlam — where she died in 1804. It was a bleak and tragic end and not one we remember on our banknotes.
But Turner’s mum is probably the reason why Turner Two exists and why in his flaying brilliance — his tearing up of the rule book, his arrogant disregard of the laws of technique, composition and method, his ecstatic worship of what others view as nothingness, and all the assorted strayings-away from the norm that make him such a gripping and wayward genius — we need probably to see him as his mother’s son.
Everything about Turner is interesting, but nothing about him puzzles me more than his lack of evident Englishness. For someone who was born in Covent Garden in London and grew up in Brentford, he doesn’t ’alf seem foreign. Unlike Constable, his only real rival for the title of Britain’s greatest artist, Turner is a cauldron of hot and spitty emotions, a volcanic pictorial presence that you can imagine Vesuvius expectorating in one of its recurring eruptions. But not a small tonsorium in mid-Enlightenment London.
In Tate Britain’s Clore gallery, where the pictures he left to the nation are piled up like eggs on a battery farm, it is hard today to get an easy sense of his thrilling waywardness. As a location, the Clore deadens and dilutes. I usually believe firmly in respecting the wishes of museum donors, but Turner’s desire to have everything he left to the nation kept and shown together has had a flattening impact on his achievements — so much art running into so much more art. His giant bequest has helped to create Turner One, but it gets in the way of seeing Turner Two. So prolific was he, so obsessive in his attentions, that seeing him in bulk makes it easy to suspect him of repetitiveness.
At the Tate, only the craziest pictures stand out. Like the nutty portrait of Napoleon standing in the middle of a kaleidoscopic blizzard, in the painting known weirdly as War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet. Or its frosty pair, Peace — Burial at Sea, a shipping scene that looks as if it is being viewed through the windscreen of a car before the antifreeze kicks in.
On paper, it is landscape art, but in reality it constitutes a delve into deep and melancholy fissures of the psyche: a swirling madness that found release and a safe way to emerge in paint. On paper, and in our national calendars, Turner has become a tame artistic presence. But away from the paper, in the real and exciting contretemps of art, he will sneak up and scratch your eyes out if you let him.
Never turn your back on Turner.