As Tate marks Turner’s 250th birthday, his visions of a wild world still elevate, soothe and harrow the soul – The Art Newspaper

The Tate makes a bold claim in its press announcement heralding Turner 250— a year-long festival of exhibitions and events this year celebrating 250 years since the birth of J.M.W. Turner.

“Born on 23 April 1775, J.M.W. Turner is widely considered to be the greatest and most influential British artist of all time,” it says. It is an assertion that will be tested across more than 30 national and international projects that reassess the painter’s legacy and impact.

The planned events, listed on the Tate’s website, range from an exhibition of Turner’s most ambitious series of landscape engravings at The Whitworth in Manchester (Turner: In Light and Shade, until 2 November, free entry) to a blockbuster pairing at Tate Britain’s Turner and Constable show this winter (27 November-12 April 2026).

Turner also draws crowds overseas. Dialogues with Turner: Evoking the Sublime, billed as the largest exhibition of oil paintings ever loaned by the Tate, is at the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai until 10 May. So far it has drawn 160,000 visitors under a partnership between the UK museum and the state-owned developer Shanghai Lujiazui Group.

Turner’s legacy keeps on giving, though his art has dipped in and out of fashion. Rarely discussed aspects of his practice explored during Turner 250 include his depictions of animals and birds in Turner’s Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and Beasts at Turner’s House in Twickenham (23 April-26 October). His fascination with living creatures introduces an informal side to his biography, says Nicola Moorby, the show’s curator and author of the forthcoming book Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape.

Meanwhile, some experts believe the artist pre-empted issues around climate change. In the exhibition Turner: Always Contemporary, at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool from 25 October to 22 February 2026, visitors will see works by contemporary and Modern artists interspersed with paintings drawn from National Museums Liverpool’s collection of Turner’s oil paintings, works on paper and prints.

Melissa Gustin, the curator of British art at National Museums Liverpool, says: “The final section is on climate change through primarily the figure of mountains and glaciers, and how he and Ruskin visited the Swiss Alps and noted the changing character of the glaciers during their lifetimes. We can use those kinds of documentations from the 1840s to see the current crisis being commented upon in the 19th century.”

She adds: “We focus essentially on how his work has always been contemporary, how he’s continually reinvented, and how he’s continually relevant over the past 200 years.” The aim is also to show how Modern women artists such as Maggi Hambling, Bridget Riley and Sheila Fell have engaged with his themes. “Turner is a bit blokey and always commented on in relation to John Ruskin or Constable,” Gustin says.

Other aspects of his life and work are still contested though. In 2021, a row erupted after Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson highlighted Turner’s £100 investment in 1805 in a Jamaican cattle ranch that used slave labour.

A Tate statement online explains nonetheless the artist’s developing progressive views on slavery, spotlighting the painting Slave Ship (1840), which is based on the notorious 1781 massacre of slaves on the Zong. “Turner resurrected this crime against humanity in a painting that harrows the soul with its bloody sky and flesh-filled sea,” wrote Jonathan Jones in The Guardian.

The Tate also points out that while Turner dedicated a print of his painting The Deluge (exhibited in 1805) to a well-known abolitionist, his early patrons included slave owners as well as abolitionists.

Sketchbook puzzles

A key anniversary project, which will benefit both scholars and a more general audience, is the completion of the online catalogue of sketchbooks, drawings and watercolours by Turner housed at the Tate in London. Most of these 37,500 or so works on paper were saved for the nation after Turner’s death as part of the Turner Bequest in 1856. The entire bequest, most of which is now housed in the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain, includes nearly 300 oil paintings and 300 sketchbooks.

Since 2002, curators and researchers have been working through the works on paper. “The quality of the entries that the cataloguers have written has never wavered,” says Amy Concannon, a senior curator of historic British art. “There’s a consistency from the entries created in 2002 to those rounding off the completed project in 2025.” She describes the logistics behind the ambitious initiative as challenging. “Historically, cataloguers in the past who may have first edited the body of material itself saw fit to reassemble some sketchbooks to keep them intact. But some sketchbooks were reassembled perhaps in a different order.”

The database reveals some interesting discoveries. Research published in 2014 shows how one recent Tate cataloguer, Matthew Imms, discovered that two watercolours by Turner, believed to be studies for two oil paintings showing a devastating fire in 1834 at the Houses of Parliament, in fact depict a later fire at the Tower of London. “We discovered that the studies we thought were linked to those paintings were actually of a different fire altogether,” Concannon says.

Turner’s love for Wales is manifest in drawings he made on tours in the 1790s. The Tate’s section on drawings related to the Welsh tour of 1799 incorporates “a series of large studies made or begun, most unusually, on the spot in Snowdonia during Turner’s tour to Lancashire and North Wales in 1799”. Concannon says Turner had a special relationship with Wales. “When he was a young man, Italy and the continent were cut off in terms of access. But Wales opened up his eye to sublime scenery.”

• tate.org.uk/art/turner-250