Years ago, I was asked to write a screenplay about JMW Turner for Peter O’Toole (who was not going to play Turner). Sadly, the film never happened. It might have been a chance to redress the fact that most films about artists set in the past come badly unstuck when it comes to recreating the actual practice of drawing and painting. Peter Greenaway, in The Draughtsman’s Contract, took trouble to provide authentic 17th-century costumes and architecture, yet the draughtsman’s drawings – central to the plot – are embarrassingly late 20th-century in style. Likewise, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio indulges in painterly oil-sketching procedures unthinkable in Caravaggio’s time.
When I, and some of my colleagues on the Turner’s House Trust, were consulted by Mike Leigh and his team for the film Mr Turner, we found them already steeped in the artist, his life and times. They were well-read, stimulating to talk to, not really in need of much guidance from us. And watching the finished film was a strange mixture of the comfortably familiar and the utterly strange: Turner and the early 19th century bursting fresh and fully formed from creative minds, quite different from those of art historians and museum curators.
As everyone knows, Leigh is an idiosyncratic director. His methods are inscrutable, he keeps his cards close to his chest. He seems to enter into a mystic pact with his actors who join him in a passionate attempt to get as close to their subject as possible, to identify with characters and events as though they were reliving them not as mere imitators but as incarnations of those people and events. Stanislavsky is only the starting point as far as Leigh’s method is concerned. As for plot, that emerges out of the white heat of this debate.
The result is a deeply moving and beautiful film, centred on Timothy Spall’s powerful characterisation of the artist: crude, rude, porcine, yet sensitive and tender. It’s impressive and convincing, but it’s not quite the Turner I know.
First of all, there’s the fascinating question of period dialogue. The cast improvise their conversations in the language of Turner’s time. This is a chancy business. Miraculously, the experiment doesn’t become laughable or painfully anachronistic. I did find myself wondering about the magical opening sequence of the film, though. We’re in the Netherlands (there’s a windmill), with two women in white lace caps advancing towards us down alane, chatting volubly in 1820s Dutch. As they pass us, still chatting, the camera pans up to the top of the grassydyke behind them, and there is a man in a crushed top hat earnestly sketching a sunset.
When Turner was on tour, he drew the multitudinous details of local costume, trades and employments, and his Dutch sketchbooks in particular are full of such observations. Why wasn’t he taking note of those girls, those wonderful caps? The film makes clear he had an eye for the ladies. He didn’t need to stand on a dyke in the Netherlands to draw the sky. And, if the Netherlands was to be introduced at the outset, whydidn’t Turner’s numerous Dutch seascapes figure in the ensuing story?
Spall went to great lengths to get his drawing and painting right, and sort of succeeds. He misses the crucial point, though: that Turner was a miniaturist by temperament. He made innumerable watercolours on a tiny scale, compressing astonishing amounts of topographical and atmospheric detail into them, and the sketchbooks he took with him on tours usually function in the same way. If you look closely at his oil paintings, you find them equally detailed. The current Late Turner show at the Tate in London provides plenty of opportunity for this, though, by omitting the small-scale works, it tends to stress the breadth rather than the precision. But there are watercolours of Lake Lucerne or Venice that illustrate the delicacy and subtlety of his observation. Likewise with the oils: examine his famous steamer in a snowstorm, and you will find it is painted with minute care in every part. There is finedraughtsmanship in the windlashed sea itself. You understand why Turner was infuriated when critics called it “soapsuds andwhitewash”.
Spall is decidedly of the soapsuds-and-whitewash school of painting. He smears and spits and swipes at the canvas, enacting what the contemporary public choose to believe about Turner, and what modernism has asked us to believe, too. In the same spirit, Spall draws with his pencil or chalk held like a needle at the extreme end away from the point, incapable of fine manipulation: not a technique for delineating every last curve of a gothic window or curl of a lace cap. Broad gestures make for good cinema, but they are a travesty of the infinitely delicate execution we find in the work itself – indeed, the unsuspected depth of human feeling that Spall’s performance brings out in the man. Fine draughtsmanship embodies tenderness: think of the exquisitely turned wrists and ankles of Degas’ dancers.
Spall denies such feelings to the artist as creator, in perhaps unintended deference to the myth that Turner was some kind of abstractionist. The Tate show sets out to demolish that myth but instead reinforces it, starting out by using a quotation, “Painting set free”, from a catalogue by Lawrence Gowing for an exhibition in New York in 1966. This deliberately recasts Turner as a rival to the American abstract expressionists. Sadly, all of this draws attention away from the real quality of Turner’s art, his love of the experienced world, and his compassion for the human beings who inhabit it.
