Late Turner: Painting Set Free

John Constable is said to have despised JMW Turner, dismissing him as ‘uncouth’, an outsider, known in polite Georgian society as a podgy little man with no grace or charm. And it was true that Turner lacked all the social connections of Constable’s comfortable merchant-class upbringing. Unlike his privileged contemporary, he had no personal allowance and had barely been educated – his father ran a barber’s shop and his mother was committed to a mental asylum. But Turner was selling paintings of moody skies off a stall in Soho by the time he was 12, and was accepted into the Royal Academy at 15. Constable, by contrast, sold little of note until he was in his 40s – he probably turned in his grave recently when Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire was voted Britain’s greatest painting in a BBC poll. Constable’s Hay Wain came second.

Late Turner: Painting Set Free is testament to the fact that Turner’s precocious talent grew into what we now accept as unrivalled portrayals of light and the elemental forces of nature that ultimately laid the foundations for Impressionism and Post- Impressionism.

By choosing to focus on his output after 1835 (when he was 60), the curators have given breathing space to pictures that haven’t already become part of our cultural wallpaper. Yes, Margate is fully represented; he did carry on painting the North Kent coast until his final days. But so are the last visits he made to northern France and Italy, their intensity even deeper than his first trips decades earlier.

The real highlights of this extensive exhibition however, are the nine canvasses known as the ‘square paintings’, shown together for the first time. Around 1840, Turner decided to experiment with a different frame support for his canvasses, eschewing the normal landscape shape in favour of perfect squares.

At the time, it was taken as a sign of his artistic decline (the critic Ruskin described this period as ‘indicative of mental disease’). Featuring mythical and biblical subjects alongside contemporary events, works including Shade And Darkness, and Light And Colour, show him utilizing the spinning vortices found elsewhere in his work to mesmerising effect.

If this was the work of someone in mental decline then there’s hope for all of us.

Until 25 January at Tate Britain, London SW1: 020-7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk