Anyone wanting to understand why Joseph Mallord William Turner is Britain’s greatest artist need look no further than his extraordinary 1842 painting Snow Storm – Steam-Boat Off a Harbour’s Mouth, on permanent show at Tate Britain. With its trail of red-tinged smoke streaming from the perilously listing ship, and surging sea captured in a spiralling vortex of paint marks that seem to pull us bodily into the tumult, this is a patently revolutionary painting. And it’s one that embodies key tropes of national identity. There’s the old chestnut, of course, about the British being an island race whose fortunes are inescapably bound up with the sea; and, even more significantly, there’s our treasured sense of ourselves as a people who are keener than most to get physically out into nature.
Not content to watch the storm from the safety of the spray-drenched harbour wall at Harwich on the Essex coast, the 66-year-old Turner claimed that he had persuaded the sailors to “lash me to the mast to observe it for four hours”. We can picture Turner himself on the fragile craft, tethered sodden to the mast, sketchbook in hand, recording the terrifying pitching of the vessel from the viewer’s imagined perspective.
