Television appearance
Turner – Light and Landscape
Leslie Primo presents this Art on the BBC film, using six decades of the BBC archive to ask why J. M. W. Turner is such a loved name in British art.
- Channel
- BBC Four
- Broadcast
- Leslie's role
- Presenter
Almost everyone admires Turner, the painter of The Fighting Temeraire and Rain, Steam and Speed, but people disagree about what makes him great. Was it that he reinvented landscape painting, that his radical work marked the beginning of modern painting, or that he captured the march of the industrial revolution?
Through the archive Leslie meets the television art historians behind each answer, among them Fiona Bruce, Simon Schama, Andrew Graham-Dixon and Kenneth Clark. The argument has produced some entertaining film-making, from a costumed reconstruction of Turner's childhood as a barber's son in Covent Garden to Tim Marlow lashing himself to a mast at sea to recreate the inspiration for Fishermen at Sea.