Turner's Britain

The great English artist J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) travelled around Britain at a time of exceptional change and upheaval following the Industrial Revolution. Unusually for a London childhood at the end of the eighteenth century, Turner's was spent away with relatives for long periods, and this set the pattern for a lifetime of journeys that saw him criss-crossing Britain in search of patronage and subject-matter. As Turner's poetry and the pattern of his print publishing confirm, it was the complex image of a growing sense of nationhood that he captured and celebrated as Britain grew to be the world's first industrial power.Author James Hamilton takes us on Turner's restless journeys on foot and horseback, by stagecoach and riverboat, as the artist sketched the rural market towns, the burgeoning industrial cities and the lonely landscapes of Wales, northern England and Scotland. Britain's past is honoured in the looming forms of ancient castles and churches, and in the picturesque jumble of ancient shops and thoroughfares; its present by canals, soldiery and industrial workings.Turner witnessed the repercussions of war in Europe and the threat of invasion to see Britain, the island kingdom, emerge as a triumphant naval power. By the 1840s Turner, now in old age, moved from his depiction of the dramatic interior of Britain to its edges. In his last images of the sea and shore, we look out across the water through Turner's eyes to a beckoning but indistinct future.