Documentary explores whether JMW Turner may have been neurodivergent | JMW Turner

He is widely regarded as England’s greatest painter, but despite his prodigious output, elements of JMW Turner’s personality remain a mystery.

Now, a groundbreaking BBC documentary delves into 37,000 of Turner’s sketches, drawings and watercolors to create an unprecedented psychological portrait; This raises the possibility that Turner’s unique view was shaped by childhood trauma and neurodivergence.

Among the figures who helped unlock the artist’s life story Turner: Secret SketchbooksThese include actor Timothy Spall, who played himself in Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner, artists Tracey Emin and John Akomfrah, Rolling Stones musician Ronnie Wood, psychotherapist Orna Guralnik and naturalist Chris Packham.

Packham said: “As with all the people we suspect of having neurodivergent traits, from Alan Turing to Isaac Newton, it is impossible to make retrospective diagnoses, so we can only speculate about this. But if Turner had significant neurodivergent traits, I suspect they would have had a pretty profound impact on his art and thought.”

Packham, an ambassador for the National Autistic Society, noted Turner’s “extraordinary” acuity for detail and his “hyperfocus,” a state of intense, prolonged concentration on a particular task or subject, often seen in conditions such as ADHD and autism.

“I see similarities there in terms of my own autistic thinking and the way I approach various things,” Packham said. “Turner was clearly a man of focused interest today. I am still happy to call it an obsession. He returned again and again to the various places where he had landscaped for a variety of reasons, one of which was probably that he was never satisfied with what he had accomplished there.”

“I also see similarities with his less impressionistic works in his attention to detail and his meticulous vision, especially exemplified in his youth. His ability to perceive it in the first place – every stone, every brick, every window – and how it intertwines with all other shapes.”

Raised in the gritty heart of Georgian London, Turner quickly became a young star of the art world despite his humble beginnings. When he was only 14 years old, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Arts and exhibited his first work there a year later.

However, the artist had a difficult childhood. He was eight years old when his five-year-old sister died. His mother, Mary, is believed to have had a psychiatric disorder and would fly into dangerous rages (she was eventually admitted to Bethlem hospital, an asylum, and died there in 1804).

Guralnik has said that he interprets Turner’s paintings as expressions of “a tumultuous, tumultuous inner world quite hidden from its external expression.” He said the artist’s innate skills and talents, as well as his childhood experiences, “have combined into this incredible power.”

“I always knew about Turner’s work,” said the New York-based psychologist. “But this documentary was an invitation to get to know him a little bit as a person, and suddenly it opened the huge door to what these paintings actually express, the inner world reflected in the water, the clouds, the climate.”

According to Guralnik, Turner’s initial inclination to draw buildings reflected his innate need for stability.

Dr. Amy Concannon is Manton’s senior curator of historical British art at Tate Britain. Turner and Constable exhibition He said the nearly 300 sketchbooks included in Turner’s will offered an opportunity to “put together the pieces of his life.”

“They tell us where he went, when he went, and they bring us closer to his mind than anything else,” he said. “From these you get a strong sense that Turner was a determined and focused individual… He was an astonishingly prolific artist, creating sketches at lightning speed and filling pages upon pages on his travels.

“These are often difficult to interpret, but there is always something new to discover in them, which is partly why their catalog has taken more than 20 years to complete.”

The BBC documentary suggests that Turner may be the first artist to document climate change.

““He was born in the age of sail, he died in the age of steam,” said Packham, and continued: “This rapid change in technology is clearly seen in his paintings. In The Fighting Temeraire, the ghostly and magnificent piece of ancient technology that fights at Trafalgar is pulled by a powerful black steam tugboat. In Rain, Steam and Speed, the steam train depicts the unstoppable power of the Industrial Revolution and everything that followed.”

Concannon pointed to Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight and Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbor’s Mouth as evidence of Turner’s growing interest in changing industrial infrastructure, labor practices, and pollution.

He said: “Although Turner was unaware of climate change as we know it, he had a keen interest in meteorology and of course studied atmospheric effects for the making of his paintings. Although he left no evidence that he did this deliberately, we can infer that some of his more colorful sunsets were inspired by the aftermath of the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815.”

This explosion in what was then the Dutch East Indies “basically accelerated climate change in a very short period of time,” Packham said. “Turner loved to be humbled by the sheer, incomprehensible power and majesty of nature. It is quite tragic that it is not a volcano but ourselves that is now shaping our climate and causing famine and destruction on Earth.”