Joseph Mallord William Taylor, Jason, 1802, Tate
There is a palpable sense of terror, adventure, and danger in Jason’s stealthy creep. The monster dragon, of whom only one gigantic coil is visible amongst the trees, rocks and bushes, has dragged himself above the cavern. Jason quietly advances into the murky mystery of what lies ahead, he, and the cloak, placed in this minor halo of light.
Turner’s ​Jason​, with its silent serpent secreted in his secluded cave, is our call to arms. We sometimes do not know the battles we are about to enter in our day to day lives, or the ones that must be fought, just as Jason is unsure of what exactly he is up against as he clambers up the rock. The magnitude or, by opposition, unimportance of the answer will come soon enough, but it is the movement forward to find it, that is essential.
Turner’s ​Jason​, with its silent serpent secreted in his secluded cave, is our call to arms
For Turner, as it was for William Blake, catastrophe and chaos were the inevitable end of imperial greed. These returns to scenes of antiquity were less exercises of nostalgia, and more a posing of what the return to the ‘wilderness’ could look like. Turner was no smooth, erudite man like many of his contemporaries – this was a man who committed his mother to the Bedlam mental asylum and never once visited her. At once arrogant and frenetic, abrasive and spiritual, he was a man with a turbulence of mind that was all too often reflected in his torturous skies and seas. This was a man who had extensively seen the ancient cities of antiquity in Italy and Greece, yet held the view that the skies over Ramsgate were ‘the loveliest in all Europe’.
The critic John Ruskin, in his lecherous piece on Turner’s painting made the proposition that the dragon is the master of all evil passions connected with envy: fraud, rage, and gloom. In the bottom, Jason, meaning​ healer​, (who in classical mythology was often conflated with the God of medicine and music, Apollo), is the glint of hope in all of us, that maybe, just maybe, things could get better.
This was a man who committed his mother to the Bedlam mental asylum and never once visited her
The whole value of the monster depends on the character of its curve. This is no faux-artistic blathering, but had it been a mere semicircle, or a series of smaller coils, it would have been ridiculous – nothing more than an exaggerated python. It is that disappearance into the shadows that suggests the heaving of enormous weight, the springing look in its bent coil the thing most frightening about it.
It is a painting that at once conjures true, base, fear – but also admiration. He is the adventurer, the explorer, within us. This was truly the first piece of art I remember seeing, on some dull school trip aged nine or so, but it has remained with me till now. The little Jason, alone, but unyielding, in an ocean of fickle brown. Perhaps a character we should all try and be, once in a while.
