Simon Schama's Power of Art - Episode 05: Turner - The Slave Ship

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Simon argues The Slave ship, one of 7 of his works causing a scandal at the 1840 Royal Academy exhibition, is typical of Turner's feeling from experience, as low-born Covent garden boy affected by family tragedy, for the common man, even prominent in his epic works, deliberately unpolished for grim effect. Despite his membership of the Royal Academy his appearance remained deliberately rough, his later life darkened by disease, loss of close one and a pain-killer which enhanced his morbid imagination. The sea, with uncut fluent lines typical for him, hence his glorious Venice period, is a common element of drama and emotions. His rendering of the Temeraire reflects the mixed public mood as industrialization takes the lead. He sided with the anti-slavery movement gaining momentum to fight slave-trade by others after the British Empire abandoned it, referring to the case of the Sun sixty years earlier, when the captain of the Sun, off Jamaica, decided to swindle the ship's insurance -for losses at sea, nor death at arrival- by dumping 132 live cargo hand-picked. Turner dramatized maximally, even replaced the Caribean sharks by piranhas he knew from Jeroen Bosch's hell scenes and setting a red-gold stormy sky above water cut by a huge dark spot for the scene, supposedly a rising typhoon. The critics were merciless for his denial of artistic conventions, Simon considers it a triumph of expression, plastic expression and even matching a social rebellion in the name of liberty with his artistic one. His more idyllic works seem serial, almost soulless by comparison.

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