Welcome to the Frist Art Museum. We are in the galleries now with the exhibition, J.M.W. Turner, Quest for the Sublime. This is a wonderful exhibition. We would love for you to be here in person, but in lieu of that, I am going to walk you through and we're going to take a look at some of these master works, not necessarily through the eyes of an art historian, but imagining ourselves as if we are within the mind of the painter himself. The exhibition itself comes to us from the Tate in London and the Tate has over a thousand works by J.M.W. Turner. So much that gives us so much information about one of the most important and transformational painters of the 19th century. Only whose work we look at today with very modernized as a precursor to some of the developments of late 19th century art such as Impressionism and even 20th century art such as abstract expressionism. So to understand a creative person, sometimes it's helpful to look at their younger years. What really inspired them to become an artist in the first place? What were their experiences? How did they learn? Turner was a lower middle class, Cockney Kid in London. He really didn't have a lot of advantages. His father was a barber. His mother came from a family of butchers. His mother actually developed psychological problems and she passed away in the hospital known as Bethlehem or otherwise known as Bedlam. So he probably had a very difficult childhood as a young man. He went to the Royal Academy of Art. Was admitted at the age of 14, which was a typical age for a young person who wanted to be an artist. Before then he had actually drawn, he'd gone to the seaside and done a lot of sketching and his father sold his drawings out of his barber shop. So early on he saw that there was commercial potential in being an artist. He could make a living as an artist early on. At the Royal Academy he studied drawing. He studied the old masters, contemporary masters and really learned how to make paintings and drawings in a way that other academicians were doing at the time. Basically looking at yourself in the context of the past, in the context of art history. The popular movement of the day was Romanticism. Turner was a classic romanticist if that's not an oxymoron. The returner, the idea and for the Romantics the idea was that in spite of the rise of empiricism, the rise of the enlightenment in which human reason was seen as being the driving force behind human progress, the Romantics were interested in emotion, strong emotion. They're interested in the imagination, in dreams. The power of color to transform the viewer and to convey something really innate and powerful to a viewer that had nothing to do with reason, that went beyond reason. So the Romantics were interested in something called the sublime. For them the sublime meant that you were in confrontation with these forces of the universe that were much greater than you. And in some ways these forces could give you a sense of oneness, a sense of participation in the ocean, if you're looking at the ocean, in the starry sky, if you're looking at that, but also a sense of fear. The idea that you are in some ways inconsequential when confronted with the forces of the universe, with the power of nature. And so one of the favorite subjects for a lot of Romantic artists was the sea. The sea really embodied the sublime. So Turner's first painting to be shown at the Royal Academy, shown when he was only 21 years old, is called Fisherman at Sea. And this is a painting that says Fisherman braving the elements, going up against the huge swelling waves off the Isle of White. It's a work of the imagination. Turner wasn't there and another boat trying to capture it, but he does capture the sensation of these Fisherman battling nature, confronting nature. We don't know whether nature is going to drown the Fisherman or whether they're going to return safely to their home. So it's a really classic kind of idea of what Romantic painting is all about. That idea of risk, the idea of confronting the unknown, confronting nature, the idea that humanity needed to be in some way humble in the face of nature. Something that we really understand today. One of the things that the Romantics thought with regard to the sublime was that you didn't really want to be in the middle of something terrifying in order to have this feeling, this powerful emotion. You wanted to be able to see it from a safe distance. If you can picture an equivalent of looking at a horror movie. You don't want to be inside what's happening in the horror movie. You want to see it from knowing that you're safe from a safe distance and therefore you'll get this aesthetic response to it. So that idea of distancing was something that was critical to the Romantics approach to art making. So it's almost as if you're looking through a window. You're looking at this painting, the Fisherman heading out to see off the aisle of white. But we know that we're safe. We're on the other side of the painting. We're on the other side of the window.