Turner

Summary: One of Britain's most celebrated artists, Turner showed exceptional artistic talent from an early age and entered the Royal Academy at fourteen. His English landscapes made his name but there was a darker side to his paintings that was difficult for the critics to swallow, both in the increasingly informal use of paint and the subject matter that was critical of the romanticised vision of Britain in the late nineteenth century. Using a combination of dramatic reconstruction, photography, and Schama's narration, this program looks at the contrast between his soft-focus pictorialism and his often-raw subject matter, along with extensive commentary on "The Slave Ship," his surreal, almost Boschian work which commented on an inhumane and savage massacre by the English of Africans bound for slavery in the New World many years before, to a self-congratulatory and repulsed English audience.