All painters deserve a catalog of images for posterity. It doesn’t matter whether or not they belonged to a movement or a school. Artistic collection is a right. Whether they managed to transcend their era is another matter. Although even if they didn’t, they still deserve respect. But dialogue with posterity is something that is literally beyond the creator’s control. Sometimes it is not even a matter of vanity. It is often a case of imagined pretension. Nor is it good to involve popularity achieved through sacrifice for the future. But there is everything in the comings and goings of the creative ego.
It is said that time is the best judge of works of art. But, strictly speaking, it is fair and collective opinions—whether from painters or art critics—that place an artist in their rightful place. What would that place be? Well, the one that attracts the most attention. Because consensus on the quality of something or someone does not imply uniformity of thought. It is plurality that tolerates the value judgments of consensus. This has happened with rediscovered painters who are now rare classics, such as Poussin or El Greco. Time is not the true estimator of works of art. It only presents itself as a participant or visual container.
As has happened with others, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) did not need to be rediscovered. Someone like him, recognized from an early age by the academy (Royal Academy of Art), would not be forgotten even after his death or with the arrival of other attractive painters with revolutionary techniques. How was someone who worked almost exclusively in the landscape genre able to reinvent himself? Was it just eccentricity for the sake of legitimacy? He must have had a very open or generous sensibility to respect, for example, two painters as different as Claude Lorrain and John Constable. Although both had (have) a rebellious streak in their obstinacy, they also drew on almost the same references. Between them (and thanks to them later), they assumed influences that were not always acknowledged, as if “images were contagious,” in the words of my esteemed Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego.
All painters deserve a catalog of images for history, I repeat. But cinema chooses not only surprising works but also seductive lives. With William Turner, his art clouds his most personal narrative—which couldn’t be more ironic coming from a great painter of clouds like him. That’s why it’s revealing how, after documentaries about the English painter’s peculiar technique, such as The Sun Is God (Michael Darlow, 1974), Mike Leigh decided to shoot the feature film Mr. Turner (2014).
He did so, perhaps, to balance what had not been said about the daily life of a man separated from his sick mother, spoiled by his father, skilled at observing nature, but very clumsy at communicating his incredible learning. He took it on because no filmmaker had dared to write a biography of Turner. Leigh chose Timothy Spall with great success for the lead role.
The choice of a mature actor, difficult to rejuvenate even with makeup—unless they had resorted to visual effects to change his figure, as was done with Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008)—allows us to recreate what could have been the last creative stage of the insistent landscape painter. He declined to do the usual: “A biopic becomes a kind of ridiculous charade. We would have had to find a little fat boy who looked like Timothy Spall and could paint. That for starters. Actually, it’s all very silly.”[1] This is the Turner of his final period, the epitome of his art. The man who understood the sublimity of a shipwreck or a fire reflected in the sea, the sublimity of nature and the Industrial Revolution. This is the Turner who, in the very environment of artistic socialization, still spits and scratches the canvas with his fingernails; the one who defends a Lorrain who died years ago, when the young theorist Ruskin compares and disparages him; the one who has already dematerialized the landscape: objects are barely recognizable, the vaporous, the succinct and, above all, the light invade the pictorial event.
Although the film shows paintings of calm boats or boats being tossed by the sea, the author of Ulysses Mocking Polyphemus is missing, a piece of Romanticism in the passionate escape through a seascape, in which the waters still seem calm, in contrast to the confused frenzy of the clouds. The despair and rage presumed in the cyclops dominate the sky. Turner uses blue-green for the shadows and as a contrast to the gold of his characteristic yellow tones. But, in truth, the sun is as much or more of a protagonist than the Greek hero’s boat. Does this light belong to a sunset? In canto IX of the Odyssey, we are reminded that it was in the morning when the plan to blind Polyphemus was hatched. Turner captures that probable dawn that promised freedom for the moment.
But Leigh is interested in the Turner of Light and Color (Goethe’s Theory) — The Morning After the Deluge — Moses Writing the Book of Genesis. However, this painting is not shown. Perhaps it would require a tedious explanation on screen. It is preferable to move on from Hannibal Crossing the Alps to technological modernity rushing not against, but into nature, with a title that says it all: Rain, Steam, and Speed. The Great Western Railroad. However, the importance of this oil on canvas is less attended to in the film than the watercolorist’s first and second encounters with photographic portraiture. That said, the reproduction that inspired The “Temerario” towed to its final berth for scrapping, estimated in the film, is surprising.
The challenge of a film biography of a painter as peculiar as Turner is that the extra-aesthetic matters as much as his art. However, an artist’s view of the world is often very different from how reality is perceived. In other words, no matter how colorful and luminous Venice was for Titian, his paintings—like those of El Greco or Van Gogh—do not copy an exact environment. Strictly speaking, even hyperrealism is emulation and boasting about the photographic convention and what exists in the environment, which is so changeable and almost always ephemeral. A painting, like any art, is technique, convention, and language. Recomposition of the world. What cinema sometimes does in relation to a painter is to bring some of their works to life, with varying degrees of success. Dick Pope, director of photography for Mr. Turner, chooses to fix the amber tones typical of the palette of the author of The Burning of the Houses of the Lords and Commons. He does so with mastery. Cinematic art imitates painting.
Mr. Turner highlights the defined aesthetic of a magnificent painter and, at the same time, the man with his miseries and virtues. It is hard to imagine any other actor than Timothy Spall playing Turner: selfish, sullen, and sometimes affectionate. Geniuses have complex psychological and sociological characters. More than ten years have passed since the premiere of this fascinating film. I don’t think it has been given the importance it deserves. May 2025, 250 years after the birth of William Turner, serve to pay tribute to an unforgettable provocateur of painting.
[1] Interview with Mike Leigh by Isabel Stevens, in Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, December 2014, No. 33 [84], p. 39.
