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The artist Turner and his depictions of India

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ALTHOUGH THE ROYAL Academician John Zoffany (1733-1810) visited India and created paintings there, the younger and more famous Academician JMW Turner (1775-1851) never visited the country. Yet, an exhibition at the Tate Britain in London, which is showing until 12 April 2026, contains two of Turner’s depictions of Indian landscapes.

Both Zoffany and Turner lived and worked before the birth and full exploitation of photography. Travellers could record their impressions of places both by writing and by sketching or painting. Amongst the many who went out to India in the nineteenth and earlier centuries, there were plenty of officials (both military and civilian) who recorded what they saw by sketching and with paints. It would seem that these people were skilled artists probably because art was included in their education. The images created were important for surveying and topographical purposes as well as, perhaps, a way of passing time in outposts where there was little else to do when the work of the day was over.

Turner, who had become a successful artist, was often commissioned by print publishers to create images that could later be reproduced as mass produced editions of engravings. He painted images of places he had visited as well as places he had never been to. India was one of the latter. However, he created beautiful watercolour depictions of Indian landscapes based on sketches that had been made by British army officers when they were based in India. The two ‘Indian’ watercolours on display in the exhibition are “Musooree and the Dhoon from Landor” (painted in 1835) and “Rocks at Colgong on the Ganges in Bihar” (painted c1835). Both are exquisitely executed and less ethereal than some of his better-known paintings.

Although Turner never travelled outside Europe, it is highly likely that the influence of British India made itself felt in his later works. In an interview recorded in the scroll.in website (https://scroll.in/magazine/827492/how-the-british-raj-in-india-brightened-the-palette-of-jmw-turner), Tate Britain curator David Blayney Brown is quoted as saying:

“Turner was a great and inventive colourist. If you look at his work from the beginning to the end of his life, the early works are quite dark and sombre, but the later ones are full of colour – brilliant yellow, red, blacks, crimsons, blues. Even if he hadn’t been to somewhere like India, he lived in a place where a lot of people had and they were bringing back descriptions of a more colourful place than England, which was smoky and dark and dull and raining all the time. People were coming back to this England with memories of a place that was full of colour. This was bound to change people’s ideas. In Sir John Soane’s museum in London, there is a bright yellow living room, almost an Indian yellow. That was a yellow that was introduced in Turner’s lifetime, much brighter than anything available before. The tastes for those colours would definitely have been brought back from the empire.”

Even if we cannot be certain, it is possible that some of the pigments brought back from India might have found their way on to his glorious canveses.

The two Indian landscapes form only a minute part of a large, well-attended show setting the works of Constable and Turner side-by-side. Yet, seeing them really helped make the exhibition a ‘hit’ for me. Soon, I will write about other aspects of this show that caught my interest.

The artists John Mallord Turner and Mark Rothko and abolition of slavery

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AFTER BEING DISAPPOINTED by the large temporary exhibition of playful but repetitive works by the artist Sarah Lucas (born 1962) at Tate Britain, we had a coffee and then revisited the rooms containing paintings and sketches by John Mallord Turner (1775-1851). It has been many years since we last viewed these paintings, and seeing them revived our spirits after having had them somewhat lowered by the Lucas exhibition.

One of the Turner galleries contains a particularly fine painting by the American artist Mark Rothko (1903-1970). It hangs amongst a series of Turner’s often unfinished late experiments on canvas. They were mostly items found in Turner’s studio after his death. Without outlines, these almost ethereal paintings are examples of the artist’s experimentation in ways of depicting light and colour. If one did not know when these works were created, one might easily guess that they are the works of an artist working during the age of Impressionism. As an aside, many of Turner’s finished works are extremely impressionistic, and I consider him to be the pioneer of what later became Impressionism, and one of the best creators in this style. These experimental works were displayed at an exhibition in New York City at its Museum of Modern Art in 1966. That year, Rothko remarked:

“This man Turner, he learnt a lot from me”.

The Rothko painting hanging amongst the Turner experiments was created in 1950-52. Later, in 1969, Rothko donated a set of his paintings to the Tate, hoping that they would be hung close to those of Turner. They are not; they are hanging at the Tate Modern.

Moving away from the room in which the Rothko painting is hanging, I came across another Turner painting that interested me, “The Deluge”, which was first exhibited in about 1805. In the bottom right corner, Turner has painted a black-skinned man rescuing a naked white woman. On close examination, the man can be seen to have a chain around his waist. The Tate’s caption to this picture includes the following:

“Painted at a time when the cause for Britain to abolish its enslavement of people of African descent was gaining ground, this detail is significant.”

Some years after it was painted, Turner gave a print of this work to a pro-abolition Member of Parliament.

“The Deluge” is not the only painting by Turner relating to his sympathy for the abolition of slavery. His “The Slave Ship”, first exhibited in 1840, is another powerful example. This painting, now in Boston (Massachusetts), is based on the dreadful incident when, in an attempt to cheat the insurers, the captain of a slave ship, the Zong’, caused 132 slaves to be thrown overboard (in 1781).  Turner had learned about this crime from the anti-slavery activists with whom he associated. Although Turner, a liberal, was sympathetic to the abolition of slavery, he was not totally divorced from the benefits that transatlantic slavery brought to Britain, as was pointed out by Chris Hastings in the “Mail Online” on the 28th of August 2021:

“One of Britain’s greatest painters has fallen victim to woke culture, as art-lovers are being warned not to ‘idolise’ J. M. W. Turner because he once held a single share in a Jamaican business that used slave labour.”

The website of London’s Royal Academy gives more detail:

“It would be fair to assume that Turner’s views were strongly pro-abolition at the time he painted this work. However, scholars have pointed out that earlier in his career he apparently had no qualms about investing in a company that ran a plantation … In 1805 Turner invested £100 to buy a share in a business called Dry Sugar Work. Despite the name, this enterprise was a cattle farm on a Jamaican plantation run on the labour of enslaved people. The business was owned by Stephen Drew, a barrister who bought the estate from William Beckford in 1802. The firm went bust in 1808.”

Some many months ago, we saw a play at the National Theatre, “Rockets and Blue Lights” (written by Winston Pinnock). It concerns an ageing Turner seeking inspiration from a remembered incident like the awful event that took place on the “Zong”. During the play, it was alleged that because of his disgust with the slave trade, Turner gave up using sugar. Whether or not this was the case, I cannot say.

Fascinating as are abolitionist and the Rothko ‘connections’ with JMW Turner, the well-displayed paintings in the Turner galleries are all superb and well worth visiting.

An artist and a gallery in a British seaside resort

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THE GREAT BRITISH artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 – 1851) was accurately described by the writer John Ruskin as “… the father of Modern art …” in 1843. Turner first visited Margate when he was aged 11. After about 1820, he often stayed in the town because he thought the skies over the area were the most beautiful he had seen in Europe. Between 1827 and 1847, he stayed in the town in a guesthouse owned by Mr and Mrs Booth. When Mr Booth died in 1833, Turner became a close companion of the widowed Sophia Booth, who died in 1878. He also adopted the name ‘Booth’.

The house owned by Sophia Booth, where Turner resided, is no more. Where the guesthouse once stood is now occupied by the Turner Contemporary Gallery (‘TCG’). The gallery was designed by David Chipperfield (born 1953), and opened in April 2011. Just as Turner’s paintings were considered avant-garde and even provocative when they first appeared, the TCG is a highly adventurous contrast to the rest of the old town that neighbours it. Some buildings look better inside than outside. The TCG is a good example of this. The gallery spaces are spacious and well-lit both by natural and artificial light. They were a perfect place to view the highly colourful creations of the Brazilian born artist Beatriz Milhazes (born 1960), which are on show at the TCG until the 10th of September 2023.

I believe that the presence of the TCG has elevated Margate’s status from being a simple, unexceptional seaside resort to a place that attracts a much wider range of visitors than it did in the past. As happened in London’s Islington in the 1960s, a rather mundane place has become somewhere that people now feel they ‘must visit’. Although the usual British seaside attractions can still be found in Margate, the town is now also catering for the ‘up market’ clientele. And that cannot be a bad thing because when I lived in Kent (1982-1992), apart from Whitstable (and maybe Broadstairs), most of the seaside places in north and east Kent were in decline and rather melancholy.

The opening of the TCG has done for Margate what the art Triennale has done for another previously dreary Kent town – Folkestone. Even if Turner might have been shocked to see what now stands where he spent many happy hours with Sophia Booth, I feel sure that he would have been happy to know that it has revitalised a town which he loved.