Was He Really Tied to the Mast? Turner's Snow Storm

One evening in eighteen forty-two, a famous old painter sat by the fire after dinner, in a house in south London. Over and over, he kept muttering the same three words. Soapsuds and whitewash. That was what the critics had called his new painting. When the young man of the house asked him why he minded, the old painter burst out: I wonder what they think the sea is like. I wish they had been in it.

Because he said that he had been in it. The old man was Turner. He told a clergyman that in a snowstorm at sea, he had the crew of a steamboat tie him to its mast, so that he could watch the storm. He said he was tied there for four hours, and that he did not expect to come back alive.

This is the painting he made of that night, and in almost two hundred years, nobody has ever proved that his story is true.

So before we ask whether he was really out there, let us look at what he painted.

At first, we see almost nothing we can name. Snow, smoke and sea are all whirling around one point, like water going down a drain. Then, in the middle, a dark shape appears. It is a small steamboat, low in the water, with a single thin mast and a little flag at the top.

And yet, what makes this painting so strange is not the storm. It is a promise Turner wrote into its title: that he was there. So was he really tied to the mast?

This painting is called Snow Storm, Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth. Turner hung it in the Royal Academy's summer show in London, in eighteen forty-two, and today it belongs to the Tate. It is about four feet wide.

Its full title is much longer, and it ends with one more sentence. The author was in this storm, on the night the Ariel left Harwich. The Ariel was a ship, and Harwich is a port on the east coast of England.

Historians have gone looking for that ship and that night. And in Paris, twenty years before Turner told his story, another painting had already shown something very much like it.

So in this video, we are going to find out whether Turner was really tied to that mast. And to understand that, we first need to meet the man who told the story.

Turner was born in seventeen seventy-five, in the middle of London, where his father kept a barber's shop. His father was so proud of the boy's drawings that he hung them in the shop window for his customers to see.

At fourteen, Turner got into the Royal Academy's school. At twenty-one, he showed one of his first oil paintings there, and it was a sea at night: a small fishing boat in rough water, under the moon.

He painted the sea all his life, and he loved being out on the water. He travelled the cheapest way, sometimes on a coal ship, and he felt at home among sailors.

Late in life, he moved into a little house by the river in Chelsea, under a false name. He called himself Mr Booth, and the shopkeepers called him Admiral Booth, because they thought he was a retired admiral who had fallen on hard times. He never told them otherwise. Keep that in mind, because it will matter later.

By the time he was in his sixties, the sea itself was changing. Old sailing warships were being towed away to be broken up by small, smoking boats driven by steam. Turner painted one of them, and it became one of Britain's best-loved paintings.

By eighteen forty-two, Turner was sixty-seven, rich and famous, and the critics were laughing at him. That spring, he hung five new paintings at the Academy, and one critic called this one a confused dream. But one young man in London was about to defend him. He was John Ruskin, the twenty-three-year-old son of the house where Turner sat muttering by the fire.

So let us look at it again, slowly.

First, the storm. There is no horizon, no sky above and no sea below. Everything turns around the boat in one great spiral, the way a storm feels when you are inside it and cannot tell which way is up.

Then the boat. Its long, dark hull lies low across the middle, half under the waves. Above it, the mast rises at an angle, thin as a thread, with the little flag still flying at the top.

Now follow the smoke. It pours out of the funnel, brown and black, and the wind tears it away and bends it up to the top of the painting. Beside it, there is a smear of yellow light, and another small glow on the deck. These may be the signals from the title, a boat calling for help in the dark.

And just behind the mast, the clouds break open for a moment, and a pale light shines through.

The critics hated all of this. One magazine said Turner had painted with his whole array of kitchen stuff. Another joked that if the author really was in this storm, he must have been very nearly lost then, and quite lost afterwards.

But the next year, Ruskin wrote that it was one of the grandest pictures of sea, mist and light ever put on canvas. He added that to hold on to a mast and watch such a sea was a long endurance of drowning, which few people have the courage to go through.

So was he really tied to the mast?

Before we answer that, I would like to remind you of something. If you would like to have Snow Storm in your own home, you can now do so through our website. In the link in the description, you will find this painting and the other Turner paintings from this video. You will also find more than eighteen hundred great works from the history of art. And every print you order helps us keep making videos like this one.

Now then, let us continue. Was he really tied to the mast?

The whole story comes from a single letter. A clergyman from Cambridge once took his mother to see Turner's paintings. She knew nothing about art, but she stopped in front of this one and would not move. Years before, she had been caught in a storm just like it, off the coast of Holland.

When the clergyman told Turner, the painter said he did not paint it to be understood. He wanted to show what such a scene was like, and that was when he told the story of the mast. Then he asked if the clergyman's mother was a painter. No, came the answer. Then, said Turner, she ought to have been thinking of something else.

Ruskin printed that letter, and he believed it. The Tate is more careful. Its label says the story cannot be proven, but that Turner clearly wanted us to see this scene as a true record.

Now look at the evidence. A paddle steamer called the Ariel did exist. But the standard catalogue of Turner's paintings finds no record of it leaving Harwich. An art historian writing for the Tate adds that Turner is not known to have been on that coast at the time. And he was sixty-seven. As the same historian points out, a man of any age would probably not have lived through four hours like that.

And then there is this painting. The French painter Horace Vernet made it in eighteen twenty-two. It shows his grandfather, a famous painter of the sea, tied to the mast of a ship in a storm, with a sketchbook in his hand. That was already a famous story, and it may not be true either. There is no proof that Turner ever saw this picture. But the painter tied to the mast was an old legend, twenty years before Turner made it his own.

That historian, James Hall, goes further. He calls the story of the mast almost certainly a romantic myth, made up to tease the same critics who had laughed at his soapsuds and whitewash. And he points to the ship's name. In Shakespeare's play The Tempest, Ariel is the spirit who stirs up the storm for his master, the magician Prospero. That very spring, one magazine had called Turner, at his best, as brilliant as Prospero.

Remember the shopkeepers in Chelsea, who thought he was an old admiral? Turner let them believe it. So was the man who told the mast story doing the same thing, playing the old sailor and letting us believe him?

So the storm may have been real, and the mast may have been a story. But there is one more twist, and it came long after Turner died.

Turner never sold this painting. He kept it for the rest of his life. He died in Chelsea in eighteen fifty-one, still known on his street as Mr Booth, and he left his paintings to the nation.

More than a century later, a museum in New York hung it in a show that presented Turner's late paintings as the first steps toward modern abstract art. The picture the critics called soapsuds was now a hundred years ahead of its time.

In two thousand seven, an English artist even tried to repeat Turner's night himself, off the beach at Brighton, on a home-made raft. And in twenty twenty, the face of the old man the critics laughed at went onto Britain's twenty-pound note.

So now, I would love to know what you think. Look at that little mast one more time. Was Turner really tied to it? Yes or no? Tell me in the comments.

And if you like a painting that hides its answer in plain sight, the next story is about one hand pointing across a dark room. Five men sit at a table, so which one of them is Matthew? That story is right here.