The Tate makes a daring declare in its press announcement heralding Turner 250— a year-long competition of exhibitions and occasions this 12 months celebrating 250 years because the beginning of J.M.W. Turner.
“Born on 23 April 1775, J.M.W. Turner is broadly thought of to be the best and most influential British artist of all time,” it says. It’s an assertion that can be examined throughout greater than 30 nationwide and worldwide tasks that reassess the painter’s legacy and affect.
The deliberate occasions, listed on the Tate’s web site, vary from an exhibition of Turner’s most formidable collection of panorama engravings at The Whitworth in Manchester (Turner: In Gentle and Shade, till 2 November, free entry) to a blockbuster pairing at Tate Britain’s Turner and Constable present this winter (27 November-12 April 2026).
Turner additionally attracts crowds abroad. Dialogues with Turner: Evoking the Chic, billed as the most important exhibition of oil work ever loaned by the Tate, is on the Museum of Artwork Pudong in Shanghai till 10 Might. To date it has drawn 160,000 guests beneath a partnership between the UK museum and the state-owned developer Shanghai Lujiazui Group.
Turner’s legacy retains on giving, although his artwork has dipped out and in of style. Not often mentioned features of his observe explored throughout Turner 250 embody his depictions of animals and birds in Turner’s Kingdom: Magnificence, Birds and Beasts at Turner’s Home in Twickenham (23 April-26 October). His fascination with dwelling creatures introduces an off-the-cuff facet to his biography, says Nicola Moorby, the present’s curator and creator of the forthcoming guide Turner and Constable: Artwork, Life, Panorama.
In the meantime, some consultants consider the artist pre-empted points round local weather change. Within the exhibition Turner: At all times Modern, on the Walker Artwork Gallery in Liverpool from 25 October to 22 February 2026, guests will see works by modern and Trendy artists interspersed with work drawn from Nationwide Museums Liverpool’s assortment of Turner’s oil work, works on paper and prints.
Melissa Gustin, the curator of British artwork at Nationwide Museums Liverpool, says: “The ultimate part is on local weather change via primarily the determine of mountains and glaciers, and the way he and Ruskin visited the Swiss Alps and famous the altering character of the glaciers throughout their lifetimes. We are able to use these sorts of documentations from the 1840s to see the present disaster being commented upon within the nineteenth century.”
She provides: “We focus basically on how his work has at all times been modern, how he’s regularly reinvented, and the way he’s regularly related over the previous 200 years.” The purpose can also be to indicate how Trendy ladies artists similar to Maggi Hambling, Bridget Riley and Sheila Fell have engaged along with his themes. “Turner is a bit blokey and at all times commented on in relation to John Ruskin or Constable,” Gustin says.
Different features of his life and work are nonetheless contested although. In 2021, a row erupted after Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson highlighted Turner’s £100 funding in 1805 in a Jamaican cattle ranch that used slave labour.
A Tate assertion on-line explains nonetheless the artist’s creating progressive views on slavery, spotlighting the portray Slave Ship (1840), which relies on the infamous 1781 bloodbath of slaves on the Zong. “Turner resurrected this crime in opposition to humanity in a portray that harrows the soul with its bloody sky and flesh-filled sea,” wrote Jonathan Jones in The Guardian.
The Tate additionally factors out that whereas Turner devoted a print of his portray The Deluge (exhibited in 1805) to a well known abolitionist, his early patrons included slave house owners in addition to abolitionists.
Sketchbook puzzles
A key anniversary venture, which is able to profit each students and a extra normal viewers, is the completion of the net catalogue of sketchbooks, drawings and watercolours by Turner housed on the Tate in London. Most of those 37,500 or so works on paper have been saved for the nation after Turner’s loss of life as a part of the Turner Bequest in 1856. The whole bequest, most of which is now housed within the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain, contains almost 300 oil work and 300 sketchbooks.
The exhibition Turner’s Kingdom: Magnificence, Birds and Beasts at Turner’s Home in Twickenham (23 April-26 October) will embody Turner’s 1816 sketch of a peacock
© Leeds Museums and Galleries/Bridgeman Pictures
Since 2002, curators and researchers have been working via the works on paper. “The standard of the entries that the cataloguers have written has by no means wavered,” says Amy Concannon, a senior curator of historic British artwork. “There’s a consistency from the entries created in 2002 to these rounding off the finished venture in 2025.” She describes the logistics behind the formidable initiative as difficult. “Traditionally, cataloguers prior to now who could have first edited the physique of fabric itself noticed match to reassemble some sketchbooks to maintain them intact. However some sketchbooks have been reassembled maybe in a unique order.”
The database reveals some fascinating discoveries. Analysis revealed in 2014 reveals how one current Tate cataloguer, Matthew Imms, found that two watercolours by Turner, believed to be research for 2 oil work displaying a devastating fireplace in 1834 on the Homes of Parliament, actually depict a later fireplace on the Tower of London. “We found that the research we thought have been linked to these work have been truly of a unique fireplace altogether,” Concannon says.
Turner’s love for Wales is manifest in drawings he made on excursions within the 1790s. The Tate’s part on drawings associated to the Welsh tour of 1799 incorporates “a collection of enormous research made or begun, most unusually, on the spot in Snowdonia throughout Turner’s tour to Lancashire and North Wales in 1799”. Concannon says Turner had a particular relationship with Wales. “When he was a younger man, Italy and the continent have been reduce off by way of entry. However Wales opened up his eye to chic surroundings.”
- tate.org.uk/artwork/turner-250
