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‘ EAVESDROPPING ON SCIENCE’: TURNER ACCUSED.

The ‘Turner and the Elements’ exhibition, opening at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, in January , is a ‘must’ on my 2012 calendar. We are also promised a new book of essays on the exhibition ‘s theme by Turner’s biographer, James Hamilton, who has done much to illuminate and popularise Turner’s life and works.
What a pity, then, that he seems to have induced – with both The Guardian’s Art correspondent, Mark Brown, and BBC News Online ( Entertainment and Arts ) - some tabloid- style ‘revelatory’ captions which both obscure and trivialise the great, two-way creative ferment that Turner and his contemporaries in the arts and sciences were living through.
The BBC version suggests Turner, his ear to the wall separating the rooms of the Royal Academy from those of The Royal Society, is “ eavesdropping for ideas”. This has all the semblance of a failed, embarrassing joke ; until capped by Hamilton’s own reported assurance that “ the thin walls would have allowed the artist to overhear their discoveries “.    Oh dear!
Slightly more restrained, but still off-track, was The Guardian Online’s take on the felony ( much derided in its readers’ posts ) …..

“ Turner used science to paint the sun” as lead in to “ … JMW Turner’s work was also rooted in ground-breaking scientific theories.. “

That, I suppose, is slightly better than hacking into the Royal Society’s intimate chats!   Again, however, a scintilla of reality - the pervasive influence of the great Herschel’s pioneering work in astronomy – risks being torn from the wider, more complex and heady environment of the two-way creative ideas supercharging the 19th century arts/science dialogue.

The point is that we have come a very long way, in the past ten years, in building a plausible, very exciting account of this revolutionary century, crowned by Charles Darwin’s 1859 ‘The Origin of Species’ - the very years within which Turner was born, worked and died ( 1775 – 1851 ). Many, including James Hamilton, of course, have contributed to the building and refining of this picture; and perhaps, especially so :

- Ashton Nicholls ( editor, ‘Romantic Natural Histories’. Houghton Mifflin, 2004) and

- Richard Holmes ( ‘ The Age of Wonder ‘, Harper Press, 2008 ).

( see my 2010 post ‘Upon a Peak in Darien; new vistas from old places’: below )

http://www.creativevaluenetwork.com/arts-science/upon-a-peak-in-darien-new-vistas-from-old-places/

Luckily no one has yet accused Shelley of klepto-poetics for his wanton borrowing from his contemporary Luke Howard’s, ( the meteorological innovator’s ) , scientific classification of clouds -( ‘ On the Modification of Clouds’ 1804 ) ;  both in his ( Shelley’s ) ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘TheCloud ‘ (1820 ). …  ”which demonstrates a remarkably accurate and scientific understanding of cloud formation and the convection cycle “.     ( Richard Holmes op. cit . p.160)

The  Cloud ….

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noon-day dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder….
__________________

First Stanza “ The Cloud “ Percy Bysshe Shelley (1820 )

The fact is that Turner, and Constable, and Shelley,  and Coleridge, and Wordsworth, like most of their ‘scientific’ peers, including Herschel and his equally brilliant astronomer sister Caroline, meteorologist Howard,   Erasmus Darwin – all were increasingly looking both up to the heavens and, through the growing spectator-sport of ‘ballooning’,    back down at planet earth, seeing both with freshly opened eyes.   Byron went to stare through Herschel’s telescope, Humphry Davy,   like Erasmus Darwin, was moving easily between his science and his poetry. Mary Shelley was writing and exploring technology with ‘Frankenstein.  When not writing or experimenting with chemistry in his Oxford college rooms, Shelley was at the latest balloon ascent in Oxford’s parks …..

And when Coleridge was asked why he spent so much time at lectures on physiology, he replied “ to increase my stock of metaphors”.  While, as Ashton Nicholls shows ( op.cit. p.19)


“ … all scientific thinking also relies on metaphors, analogies, comparison. … In this sense, Copernicus had first to imagine the sun at the centre of the solar system since there was no clear empirical evidence to support such a claim; the sun still appears to circle the earth. Likewise Charles Darwin had to imagine – and he often uses the word ‘imagine’ – that animals might be linked in the way his theory described “.

So,  far from eavesdropping at the wall,  his was the magical time when Turner could have simply knocked on the Royal Society door, and many voices would have said, “ Come in.  Come in!  What are you thinking about and working on ? “

And wouldn’t that have made a better, and essentially truer, story ?

RW. 29/11/2011.