The beauty of pollution

On the back of the British £20 note, J.M.W. Turner appears against the backdrop of his most iconic image. Voted the country’s favourite painting in 2005, ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ (1838) was Turner’s favourite too. It remained in his possession until his death; the 70-year-old artist swore in a letter of 1845 that ‘no consideration of money or favour can induce me to lend my Darling again’. But I suspect he would have approved of his darling’s current loan, along with that letter, to the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle as part of the National Gallery’s bicentenary programme of loans of national treasures to regional museums.

While other beneficiaries of the programme have been content simply to put their loans on display, the Laing has pushed the boat out with a show of 60 works – including 20 more by Turner – on the theme of ‘Art, Industry & Nostalgia’. For the Newcastle gallery the occasion represents a homecoming, because the Samson and the London – the two tugs hired to tow the hero of Trafalgar from Sheerness to Rotherhithe in 1838 to be broken up for its timber – were built on the Tyne. And the coal that powered them probably came from there too.

When Turner painted his bittersweet elegy to the age of sail with its squat black paddlewheel steam tug, funereal as Charon’s ferry, puffing pollution over the ghostly warship in its wake, coal from Newcastle powered the capital and fuelled the industrial revolution closer to home. Charles Turner’s moonlit mezzotint ‘Shields, on the Tyne’ (1823), after Turner’s watercolour, shows keelmen loading coal onto a collier while smoke rises from a smelter behind them. For the purposes of atmosphere, a man-made cloud of smoke and steam was as good as a storm cloud to Turner.