‘Mr Turner’ and ‘Mrs Lowry and Son’: The Art of Timothy Spall

It doesn’t bother me one iota that most of my career has been playing people who are not —well, let’s say that people wouldn’t aspire to be like them.  —Timothy Spall

In 2014 and 2019, the British actor Timothy Spall appeared in leading roles in two films about major English painters, respectively, J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) and L.S. Lowry (1887–1976). No two dramatic portrayals of major artists could be further apart.

Spall portrays the cockney Turner as large, robust and lumbering, like a character from Tolkien’s The Hobbit, solitary in his private life, but engaged socially in his professional duties, and supremely self-confident of his stature as a major British artist. According to Spall, when Turner met the French painter Eugene Delacroix, who had been strongly influenced by his work, Delacroix remarked, “Is that Turner? He’s like a smelly old farmer. He just grunted all the time.” Turner said, “Every time I look in the mirror I see a gargoyle.”

Joe…