J. M. W. Turner was an English landscape painter, born in London in 1775 and died there in 1851. A barber's son, he was a full Royal Academician at 26, and he painted storms, sunsets and ships until their shapes dissolved into light. Most people also know one story about him: that he had himself tied to a ship's mast in a snowstorm to see it properly.
People come to Turner for that story more than for any date. It is told about a single picture, Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, which he showed at the Royal Academy in 1842, and it is told as if it were certain.
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Turner told it himself. Critics had dismissed the canvas as soapsuds and whitewash, and he answered that he had not painted it to be understood but to show what such a scene was like. He had got the sailors to lash him to the mast to observe it, he said, and he is reported to have added that he wished the critics had been in it.
Four hours, in the version that spread. The tale stuck because it fits the picture, a steamboat all but swallowed by snow and sea. But the story rests on Turner's word, and researchers who have looked for proof of that night have not found it.
That leaves a better question than the mast. A man in his sixties, mocked in public, tells a tale about his own courage, and the tale outlives the proof. The rest of his life is easier to check: a barber's shop in Covent Garden, a seat in the Royal Academy at 26, and a house in Chelsea where he lived under a false name.
What You'll Discover
What his father did with the drawings.
How young the Academy took him.
What Ruskin saw in the storms.
What Constable said about the red.
Why a famous painter hid his name.
What the nation did with his gift.