The naked truth
A new documentary unveils artist JMW Turner’s secret passion for erotic sketches – and how critics wanted to erase them from history
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Think of the 19th-century Romantic artist JMW Turner and three famous images force their way into your mind: the locomotive hurtling out of the mist in Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway; the swirl of grey, white and black in Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth and the wooden hulk of The Fighting Temeraire being towed to the shipbreakers by a funnelled steamer, voted Britain’s greatest painting in a BBC poll in 2005.
You almost certainly won’t be thinking of the bottoms, boobs or other body parts that appear in Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks, a new BBC documentary that features Timothy Spall – who starred in Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner – Chris Packham, Rolling Stone and painter Ronnie Wood and Tracey Emin. As Emin says of the remarkable sketches: “There’s a shape that looks like an erect penis with veins. I mean, it’s really over the top. And then there’s a woman reclining with her legs slightly up and her feet crossed as if she’s in some frozen ecstasy.”
Timothy Spall (with The Fighting Temeraire) played the artist in the 2014 film Mr Turner. Allstar/FILM4
This might not be the Turner you imagined, yet the erotic sketches, being seen for the first time on television, have always been there, lurking in the huge tranche of 37,000 sketches the artist left to the nation on his death aged 76 in 1851, along with almost 300 oil paintings, collectively known as the Turner Bequest. But when the erotic sketches were discovered, the effect was dismay. Victorian writer Frank Harris gasped, “The pudenda of women, utterly inexcusable.” Horrified art historian John Ruskin, until then Turner’s fervent supporter, wrote to the National Gallery, where the Bequest was initially kept, asking that the “obscene drawings” were burnt as they had been “assuredly drawn under a certain condition of insanity”.
For Emin, Ruskin could hardly be more wrong. “There is nothing obscene that I’m looking at here,” she says of the luminous works. Ruskin, who famously failed to consummate his marriage to the pre-Raphaelite beauty Effie Gray, was sexually naive. Turner, born in Covent Garden, was not. He would visit brothels to sketch prostitutes and, as the film Mr Turner made clear, had a vigorous sex life. Accordingly, a few are graphic images.
There’s nothing obscene that I’m looking at here
Tracey Emin
“I think for many people they are surprising, because we associate Turner so closely with landscape,” says Amy Concannon, curator of this autumn’s Turner and Constable exhibition at Tate Britain in London and expert contributor to the documentary. “We, of course, don’t know whether he was just an observer or a participant in the activities depicted, but a compulsion to draw these erotic subjects seems perfectly natural for someone who was rarely without a sketchbook to hand.”
It’s this compulsive creativity that speaks directly to Ronnie Wood, now 78 and still painting. “I think what keeps you young is the drive to keep getting better,” he says. “Turner was obviously driven. He was possessed and I love that.”
Turner sketched everywhere he went in Britain and Europe, taking impressions of landscapes before completing paintings at his London studio – a process Emin, who comes from Margate where Turner did much of his sketching, well understands. “My sketchbooks work like a diary,” she says. “It’s something which I treasure. And so maybe Turner felt the same way about his own sketchbooks. It wasn’t that they were secret, it was more that they were his. ‘Let the paintings be seen but let the book belong to me.’”
A self-portrait of Turner aged 24. BBC
When we first meet Turner in Mike Leigh’s 2014 film, he is outside sketching, and Spall, who learned to paint for the role and has since exhibited his own work, has a strong sense of what the artist was thinking. “Turner was trying to touch the sublime,” he says. “The Romantic movement wasn’t about what people saw, it was about what they felt about what they saw; about trying to catch a feeling, which is over and above the arrangement of the elements that you see before you.”
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In the end, what can we know of Turner, the working-class artist who, like Emin, was welcomed into the aristocratic Royal Academy; the visionary who shocked Ruskin? “That he didn’t hold himself back,” says Emin. “I think for Turner, whatever he was painting, it was all the same stuff for him.” Shocking they might be, but the erotic sketches are not the drawings of an artist obsessed by sex, but an artist obsessed by capturing wonder wherever he encountered it. “When you think he was a man in the 1800s, painting freely with his emotions, that’s the wildest thing,” says Emin.
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