J.M.W. Turner, born in 1775, attended the Royal Academy aged 14 and grew out to one of Britain’s most celebrated artist. He is still considered a controversial figure. Wellknown as a landscape artist, there was another Turner, as Schama puts it: ‘extreme Turner, the cockney poet just short of madness, the Turner we ought to know.’
This darker side to his paintings is vividly explained in this documentary, with ‘the slaveship’ as the masterpiece of his work of 300 paintings.