This edited article about J M W Turner originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 697 published on 24 May 1975.

Turner famously lashed himself to the ship’s mast to paint a storm by C L Doughty

When a 28-year-old barber, who worked near London’s Covent Garden Market, and his 34-year-old wife had a son in April 1775, they were, of course, delighted. They probably did not know that this day, the 23rd April, was the very day of the year on which Shakespeare, England’s greatest writer, had been born in the 16th century; they certainly had no idea that England’s most famous painter had his birthday on the same day of the year, and that they were his parents. For William and Mary Turner were simple people; the father was really a Devon man, who had come to London after the death of his own father years before, and who had set up shop as a barber in what was then quite a fashionable part of the town. Being near the theatres, William used to dress wigs for actors as well as gentry, and was kept quite busy at these and the other tasks of a barber’s trade. His wife was the daughter of a London butcher, and in those days, was probably glad to marry a promising tradesman. Their son, born within a year of their wedding, was christened at the nearby church of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden; three years later, a little sister was also christened there. She died, however, when the boy was only eleven, and he felt the loss very deeply.

The heart of London, with its squares and alleys, does not seem a very promising place to grow up in for a lover of rich colours such as young Turner became. Grey stone, dull brick, and grimy plane trees did not offer much splendour, and the sun shone only fitfully in Maiden Lane, where the family lived over the barber’s shop. But young Turner was fortunate because, when his sister died, the parents feared for their son’s health so much that they sent him to lodge with an uncle at Brentford, in Middlesex, which at that time was a country village near the north bank of the Thames.

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This edited article about Ettore Bugatti originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 685 published on 1 March 1975.

A Bugatti racing car (top) by Peter Jackson

An Arab prince wrote to France to order a new car. This was in 1933 and the car he chose was no ordinary car, but a Bugatti that cost, in those days, the almost unbelieveable sum of £6,500. He wanted a catalogue, but instead he got back a letter that was short and to the point. Before his order could be accepted, he would have to go to France and arrange for an interview with Monsieur Bugatti. And as for a description of the vehicle he might then be allowed to buy, the man that the motoring world knew as Le Patron, “The Chief”, noted chillingly, “I have never considered it necessary to publish a catalogue.”

Ettore Bugatti, the genius behind France’s legendary sporting motor car, had put one more customer in his place.

Bugatti’s competitors claimed that Le Patron’s motto was “The customer is always wrong.” This was perhaps unfair, but there has almost certainly never been a car manufacturer who treated his public in such a lordly way, So far as he was concerned, he built the cars he liked. If people wished to buy them, well, that could possibly be arranged.

Italian by birth, the son of a family of artists, Ettore had decided while in his twenties that his own future lay with the beauty of machines rather than paint. Consequently, he had headed for France, the centre of the rapidly developing motor industry. In 1909, he hired an old dye works and started to make cars of his own. Not only did he make them but he also raced them, for so far as Bugatti was concerned, a car was judged by the craftsmanship that went into it and by its competition success.

He had served an apprenticeship at a factory in Milan; but Bugatti was no theoretical engineer. He had no time for mathematical calculations. One either knew what was needed or one didn’t. One told by the look, the feel, the sound of a piece of machinery; the look most of all. Just because Bugatti made cars didn’t mean that he wasn’t following the family tradition. His father made superb furniture, his brother magnificent sculptures. He, Ettore, made beautiful cars.

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This edited article about Blondin originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 683 published on 15 February 1975.

Blondin (Francois Gravelet) pushes a wheelbarrow across a tightrope over Niagara Falls

Thousands of people, stared fascinated at a rope stretched across Niagara Falls on 30th June, 1859. The rope was over a thousand feet long and a hundred and sixty feet above the roaring tumult of the river.

Suddenly the crowd froze with excitement. A man had started to walk along the rope from the American side. Half-way across, he lay down; then he proceeded to do a backwards somersault. He reached the far side and, as the cheers rang out, a band struck up the Marseillaise.

The tightrope walker started back to the American side carrying a chair. When he reached the middle of the rope, he balanced the chair on two legs and sat down on it.

The performer’s name was Blondin, and he was the greatest of all rope-walkers.

Over the centuries, the world of the circus and of acrobats has cast such a spell over so many people that it is surprising how few of its great performers are remembered by name. But there is no danger of Blondin being forgotten because, indoors as well as out, he took spectacular risks which caught the imagination of literally millions of people who never actually saw him perform.

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This edited article about packaging originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 679 published on 18 January 1975.

Attractive packaging for confectionery was important for occasions like Easter, just as specific designer packaging was used to commemorate state occasions like Coronations, producing chocolate boxes, tins and of course, mugs.

If the packets we see in the shops today are a lot smarter though a little less individual than the packs of earlier generations, this could be due to the influence of professional package designers.

Such designers were almost unknown before the late 1920s, when they came into their own in America and in Germany. In England they were unknown until the early 1930s.

The first package design course in any English art school was included in the 1932-3 syllabus of Goldsmith’s College, London, and it was the first of many.

The designer of packs nowadays is concerned with the size and shape of the package, the choice of materials for it, the way it opens and closes, its colours, and its layout and lettering.

At times he has to compromise between his own idea of what is good design, what his client the manufacturer insists on having, and what the market researchers tell him is “what the public wants”. So a degree of similarity in many present-day package designs is only to be expected.

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This edited article about Walt Disney originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 678 published on 11 January 1975.

Donald Duck and Goofy are famous Disney cartoon characters

Mention the phrase ‘Cartoon film’, and the chances are that most people will immediately bring to mind the name of Walt Disney.

For the cartoon films of this delightful film maker have been charming audiences of all ages ever since the first sound films appeared in the cinemas in 1928.

Walter Elias Disney was born at Chicago on December 5th, 1901. Trained as a commercial artist, he went to Hollywood in 1923. There, he built his first studio, in a garage, and drew animal cartoons. It was when he created one particular animal cartoon, Mickey Mouse, in 1928, that the garage developed into a huge film factory in order to keep pace with the sudden demand for Disney productions. Soon, Disney was employing hundreds of draughtsmen and controlling his own studios.

Mickey Mouse, the most famous of Disney’s creations, was followed by Donald Duck, Pluto, and Goofy.

In 1932 Disney began to make short colour films, featuring all these and a host of other characters from nature in his musical Silly Symphonies, of which Three Little Pigs is the most famous.

In 1938, Disney brought all the wit, brilliance and beauty of his film techniques to his first full-length musical cartoon film, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs. This was followed by the moral fantasy Pinocchio. In 1942 came Dumbo, the baby elephant and Bambi, the baby deer. But a year before this, Disney produced his most ambitious creative work, Fantasia in which he set patterns and stories to eight pieces of classical music.

In 1948 he produced the first in a series of brilliant factual nature films.

In 1955 Disney opened a huge amusement park in Anaheim, California, with scenery and characters based on some of his films. He called it Disneyland, and today, eight years after his death, the park, together with the films which are being shown over and over again, both in cinemas and on the television, continue to give pleasure and delight to millions of people all over the world.

This edited article about Capability Brown originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 671 published on 23 November 1974.

Blenheim Palace was Capability Brown’s most impressive achievement as a landscape gardener

If you want to be a genius, first be born at the right time in the right century. What chance would Shakespeare have had if he had been born in a Brazilian rain forest before Columbus arrived? What was the use of being a British admiral with the Nelson touch between the Napoleonic Wars and the 1914-18 war, when there was no chance for a whole century of demonstrating one’s skill in a major action?

By the same reckoning, it was no use wanting to be the world’s greatest landscape gardener if you happened to live 1,000 years ago when most of Britain was forest or wilderness.

Landscape gardening? We have arrived at last at our Georgian hero for this week, Lancelot Brown, who turned landscape gardening into a fine art and, like all the best geniuses, was born just at the right time. Not that he helped matters at the start, for he was born so humbly and obscurely that without character and luck – and even geniuses need luck – he might never have surfaced.

Until his time, in Europe at least, the gardens of the rich were formal architectural affairs, very much part of the big house. Go to Versailles if you get the chance to visit France, and you will see wonderful garden geometry, a grand 17th and 18th century affair, not like nature at all. Such gardening is marvellous, of course, but without the natural, back-to-nature look. Nobody had tried this yet, except the ancient Chinese and Japanese, who looked on gardens as pictorial works of art, as landscape paintings one might say.

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This edited article about Salvador Dali originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 671 published on 23 November 1974.

Salvador Dali was born in 1904 in Catalonia, Spain and studied in Barcelona and Madrid. His unorthodox views on painting and art brought him into conflict with the authorities and ultimately led to him being expelled from the Academy of Fine Arts. He went to Paris where he became involved with what was then a new art form called “surrealism.”

In collaboration with the film director, Louis Bunuel, Dali produced two films with a surrealistic tinge which got him into trouble with the police. But from 1932, he soon acquired a reputation throughout Europe and the United States.

Nobody quite knew what to make of his extremely bizarre canvases and subjects. Sometimes Dali allowed his innate sense of mischief to get the upper hand. A typical example is his painting of melting watches set on a rocky foreshore and called “Persistence of Memory.” Was this great art or merely a subtle joke? Even the art critics were divided.

Dali has been accused of distorting reality but indignantly denies that he does. His defence is that, just like someone with either a poetic or musical gift, he has found a deeper understanding of life than more mundane mortals. Dali attempts to communicate something of the “feel” of things or to convey what his emotions were when watching a sunset, for instance, rather than putting down on paper what a sunset looks like.

Dali is very much aware of the value of publicity and at his various exhibitions, he deliberately indulges in outrageous behaviour. He has grown a moustache with long tips that turn up at right angles like a bull’s horns. He says that they vibrate and that through them, he receives his artistic inspirations.

And Dali certainly is inspired. His remarkable three-dimensional painting of “The Last Supper” is so realistic that people commented that they felt they could reach out and pick up the crumbs spilling from the broken loaf of bread!

His draughtsmanship comes over supremely well in his magnificent picture of the Crucifixion, called “Christ of St John of the Cross.” This now hangs in the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum.

Along with Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali will go down in art history as one of the greatest and most talented painters of the century. Spain has every reason to be proud of them.

This edited article about Van Gogh originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 668 published on 2 November 1974.

Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh was one of the greatest and most revolutionary artists in the world. He was born on March 30, 1853, the eldest of six children, at Groot Zunder in Holland.

Van Gogh began work in a firm of art dealers and at the age of 24 he decided to devote his life to religion. After becoming a volunteer preacher among the miners of Belgium he soon realised that he was not suited to the life and it was at this time that he turned to painting.

Between the years 1884 and 1890 he produced about 700 drawings and 800 oil paintings, only one of which was sold in his own lifetime. Van Gogh was always desperately poor, but his faith in the urgency of what he was doing, and the encouragement he received from his younger brother, Theo, kept him going.

The letters which Vincent wrote to Theo give a brilliant insight in to the painter’s aims and beliefs. His Collected Correspondence is not only a great autobiographical record, but is also recognised as great literature.

Van Gogh painted three types of subject: still life, landscape, and figure, all of them interrelated by Van Gogh’s interest in the peasants’ daily life, the hardships they endured, and the countryside they worked on.

In 1888 Van Gogh rented a house in Arles where, for two months, he worked with another famous artist, Gaugin. Relations between the two soon deteriorated and on Christmas Eve that year, Van Gogh cut off part of his left ear, having broken under the strain of his nerves. At the end of April, 1889, he asked to be ‘temporarily shut up’ in the asylum at St Remy de Provence so that he could work under supervision.

Feelings of guilt at his dependence on his brother, despair of ever overcoming his loneliness or of being cured of his mental depressions drove Van Gogh in deep despair to commit suicide in July 1890.

Virtually unknown at the time of his death, the name of Van Gogh is now famous throughout the world. His reputation has never ceased to grow and the influence he exerted on the development of modern painting, on artists like Picasso and Matisse cannot be overestimated.

This edited article about William Hogarth originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 667 published on 26 October 1974.

William Hogarth takes a stroll in Vauxhall Gardens

The young schoolmaster was not earning enough, so he opened a coffee house where Latin was to be spoken. But even in an age when the classics were far more widely studied than they are today, he was risking his money. Or was it simply that he was not a very good businessman? Whatever the reason, the coffee house failed dismally and Richard Hogarth was flung into the Fleet Prison for debt.

With him went his wife and family, including his 10-year-old son, William, who was to be one of the greatest artists of his age. Prisons and debtors were often to feature in his work.

Until he was 15, William remained in the harsh twilight world of the Fleet, then the Government forgave debtors and let them go free. How sensible this was, for how could a man pay off his debts if he was in prison? Soon debtors were imprisoned once again, but the Hogarths were safe. And William, apart from learning the grimmer facts of 18th century life the hard way, had become very conscious of Right and Wrong, a feature of much of his art.

He had been born in 1697, and now he became apprentice to a silver plate engraver, but his main passion was sketching every sort of person and everything from savagery and cruelty to happiness and goodness. Though he painted wonderful portraits and groups of people, he was to become most famous as a “visual” artist of genius. He drew plays, as it were: “. . . my picture is my stage, and men and women my players, who by means of certain actions and gestures, are to exhibit a dumb show.”

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This edited article about Josiah Wedgwood originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 664 published on 5 October 1974.

Josiah Wedgwood and Thomas Bentley make six black vases by C L Doughty

Imagine them as frontiersmen, as pioneers, as Empire-builders, these businessmen/inventors of the 18th century, tough men, men with razor sharp minds and so full of ambition that they could overcome every obstacle.

There was Richard Arkwright, the ex-barber who experimented with cotton-spinning machines and invented a “water frame” run by water power. There was Brindley the canal builder, who worked himself to death. And there were other men who helped forge the Industrial Revolution. Of these, Josiah Wedgwood was perhaps the most ambitious of them all and in many ways the most successful, for his name, thanks to his pottery, is still a household word.

And what did Mr Wedgwood aim to do? He once wrote it down like this: “I hope to astonish the world all at once.” And how did he intend to do this? By working night and day to become vase-maker to the universe.

This big thinker and doer was born into a family of potters in Burslem, Staffordshire, in 1730, the youngest of twelve children. He was apprenticed to the family trade from the age of 14 to 19, and by 1759 he was his own master, renting from relations a cottage, two kilns, and workshops and sheds, and, once established, he mixed clays and designed pottery better than any of his workmen. He knew the trade inside out. Soon he was in bigger premises and making history with his cream-coloured earthenware.

Already on the market was expensive plate for the rich, a certain amount of pewter and also porcelain which was too delicate. Wedgwood, by using ground flint and easily-shaped Devon ball clay, then covering the result with a hard lead glaze, revolutionised the pottery trade, for soon his wares were being bought by rich and poor alike for their looks, ease of manufacture which brought the price down, and ability to withstand sudden violent temperature changes.

Yet he was so much more than a master potter. He fought to have roads improved linking the potteries with the rest of the country, and by 1765, when he was married and famous, he became a champion of the new canal-building industry, going, as usual to the top man in the trade, Richard Brindley, then lobbying Parliament to authorise more and better canals. He was a living dynamo.

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