J.M.W. Turner was a barber’s son from Covent Garden who became the most revolutionary painter in British history. He painted light itself — dissolving ships, storms, and landscapes into blazing abstractions that outraged the Royal Academy and anticipated Impressionism by half a century. He was secretive, crude in manners, and so protective of his work that he left over 19,000 pieces to the nation in his will.

This episode traces Turner from his London childhood through the watercolors that made his reputation, the increasingly radical oil paintings that divided critics, and the late works so abstract they were dismissed as the products of a madman.

• Turner’s working-class origins and the prodigious talent that got him into the Royal Academy at fourteen
• The early landscapes and seascapes that established him as Britain’s greatest living painter
• The radical late works — Rain, Steam and Speed; The Slave Ship — that anticipated modern abstraction
• The secret life, the 19,000 works left to the nation, and his posthumous recognition as a proto-modernist