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Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), which unfortunately is not able to travel outside of Boston. The Tate then approached the Kimbell, and we were delighted to accept. We have a long history of lending to and borrowing from both Tate Britain and Tate Modern, and we presented the Tate's "Turner in Venice" nearly 20 years ago. And, of course, we have a strong relationship with Boston, as I was head of European Art there for 15 years." Of the artist, Shackleford says, "Turner documented life — England at war, England and the arrival of the Industrial Age and the steam engine. Artists of his time were painting pictures; Turner was painting events for history … When Turner painted a picture of a 17th-century historic event, a contemporary Englishman would have understood. It created an environment that Turner knew how to take advantage of pictorially. Monet and Whistler, a generation later, took it to the next step." From his beginnings as a topographic watercolorist and recorder of landscapes, Turner metamorphosed into the painter mirroring the sweeping changes of his time, rendered in a novel proto- abstract style that took into account grand atmospheric effects of sea and sky. The late 18th century and the first half of the 19th century in England were an era not unlike our own, where anonymous production lines and vast factories prefigured today's harrowing globalism. In the painter's case, Great Britain — rather than the U.S. or China — was the superpower, the world's innovator in technology and industrialization. Turner was there to record the splendors and the terrors of his age, from golden Alpine or Venetian vistas to the burning of the Houses of Parliament in 1834, Napoleon's exile on St. Helena, the grim fields of Waterloo, a scene from election day 1830 won by a progressive MP, and most significantly, the slave trade, against which he took a staunch position. The painter was recognized among his contemporaries for his gifts that still stand outside time and place, both modern in subject and in ground-breaking style that verged "ARTISTS OF HIS TIME WERE PAINTING PICTURES. TURNER WAS PAINTING EVENTS FOR HISTORY." — George T.M. Shackelford , deputy director, Kimbell Art Museum COLLECTION TATE BRITAIN, LONDON; PHOTO © TATE, LONDON, 2020 36