About two weeks ago I caught an episode of Simon Schama’s PBS series, Power of Art, featuring Joseph Mallord William Turner. As in the rest of the eight-part series, this episode focuses on one work. And what a work it is: Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840; oil on canvas). Here, also as in the rest of the espisodes, Schama offers historical, cultural and artistic insight on that which he calls “the greatest British painting of the 19th century,” accompanied by re-enactments here and there. I’ll admit that before this hour-long special, I’d been most fond of Turner’s use of color, but Schama opened my eyes to the social consciousness and emotional force behind the master’s works.

As Schama says, “For Turner, art was not a placebo. It needed to wreak havoc like the storm, to have the force of an avalanche or an inferno. Great painting, his painting, needed to risk disaster, the better to communicate it.”

Sadly, the series is over; however, PBS has a fantastic website devoted to it—complete with interactive features that “explore the painting” and a map that shows which museums hold these major works—and Schama also wrote a book by the same name.

To read more on Turner, click here.