Why J.M.W. Turner has a claim to be called Britain’s greatest ever artist

William Gay Turner was aware of his son’s precocious gift for art. The barber displayed the boy’s pictures in his shop in Covent Garden, pinning them up on the walls alongside a selection of periwigs. Customers coming in for a haircut duly became the first collectors of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s art.

A long and successful career lay ahead, prompting the esteemed art critic John Ruskin to describe him in 1840 as ‘the man who beyond all doubt is the greatest of the age’. The artist is still highly regarded today — his face adorns Bank of England £20 notes, and his name is attached to Britain’s principal award for contemporary art, the Turner Prize.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of Turner’s birth, and a programme of celebratory exhibitions and events is under way. ‘Turner 250’ will collectively explore the breadth of the artist’s career and last throughout 2025.

The exhibitions include Turner: In Light and Shade at the Whitworth in Manchester, focusing on the artist’s book of prints, the Liber Studiorum; Turner’s Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and Beasts at Turner’s House in Twickenham, devoted to his little-known studies of birds and other animals; Turner: Always Contemporary at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, considering his impact on succeeding generations of artists; and Turner and Constable at Tate Britain, examining the rivalry between him and his fellow British landscapist John Constable.

In the autumn, Turner’s largest painting, The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805, will return to display for the first time in 18 months — at the Queen’s House in Greenwich — after conservation work. Around the same time, Tate will publish an online catalogue of its complete holdings of Turner’s sketchbooks, drawings and watercolours. These number more than 37,000 works, and the task took 20 years.

The anniversary is being marked beyond British shores, too, with exhibitions as far afield as the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai and the Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut.

Why all the attention? ‘From an art-historical standpoint, Turner’s importance really can’t be overstated,’ says Andrew Fletcher, global head of the Old Masters department at Christie’s. ‘His influence was extraordinary. He served as a bridge between the Old Masters before him and the modern painters that followed.’

To understand this point better, let’s recap Turner’s career. He was born on 23 April 1775 in central London, gaining admittance to the schools of the Royal Academy aged 14. That institution would remain crucial to Turner his entire life: rare were the years when he didn’t show work in its annual (summer) exhibition. He became a full Royal Academician in 1802, and five years later took up a long-term role as the academy’s Professor of Perspective.

‘He has been here and fired a gun’ — John Constable

Turner’s early imagery was topographical, the result of travels up and down Britain. It consists of remarkably graceful, delicately precise studies — such as the watercolour View of the Archbishop’s Place, Lambeth, the first work of his to show in the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition and made at the age of 15.

In his student years, Turner learned a great deal from Sir Joshua Reynolds, the academy’s first president. As per his lectures, Reynolds taught artists to work ‘always with [the Old] Masters in your company; consider them as models which you are to imitate, and at the same time as rivals with whom you are to contend’.

Where Turner differed from his teacher was in the artists he sought to emulate. His interest lay in landscape, which had hitherto been deemed a lowly genre. Influences on Turner ranged from Dutch marine pictures by the likes of Willem van de Velde, to Italianate landscapes by the likes of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin.

Such was his admiration for Claude, and confidence in his own worth, that Turner ended up bequeathing two specific paintings of his to the National Gallery — Dido Building Carthage and Sun Rising through Vapour — on condition that they hang beside a pair of similar paintings by Claude. This condition is met to this day.

Success came Turner’s way early. So much so that his father could afford to give up the barber shop and become his personal assistant. The artist was a canny businessman, too, opening a gallery for the exhibition of his work on London’s Harley Street in 1804, and understanding well the power of self-marketing.

On ‘varnishing days’ before each year’s Royal Academy exhibition — when artists applied final details to their canvases in the galleries — he was renowned for bravura flourishes of improvisation. In 1832, for example, after Turner added a striking red daub to a seascape, Helvoetsluys (which he then fashioned into a buoy), Constable lamented that his rival ‘has been here and fired a gun’.

‘He served as a bridge between the Old Masters and the modern painters’ — Christie’s Andrew Fletcher

In the first part of his career, Turner — like other British artists — was largely confined to his homeland, while the Napoleonic wars were being waged on the continent. Once peace arrived in 1815, however, he started journeying extensively and repeatedly through Europe — to France, Denmark, Switzerland, Bohemia and beyond. On these trips he encountered scenes that inspired myriad pictures.

With the passing years, Turner travelled far artistically as well as geographically. A visit to Italy in 1819 was the stimulus for heightened luminosity, for example, as well as a new vivacity in his colour. More than that, though, Turner’s art would move increasingly away from classic representation in the direction of what we today would call abstraction.

Topographical facts begin to dissolve into the atmosphere, true to Turner’s growing belief that the universe was characterised not by the solidity of things but by the unending interactions of energy and light. His final words are reported to have been ‘the sun is God’.

Watercolour was the natural medium for the radical path he was on, given its inherent fluidity. Turner managed to achieve the same effects with oil paint, however, by applying it in thin layers. A celebrated example is Norham Castle, Sunrise from around 1845, in which the eponymous riverside castle in Northumberland — like the rest of the landscape — all but disappears, enveloped in dawn light.

‘That chap Turner learned a lot from me’ — Mark Rothko

Turner had loyal patrons throughout his career, ranging from aristocrats such as the Earl of Egremont and the Earl of Harewood, to self-made men such as the coalmine owner Charles Birch. The opinion of critics and the public was largely positive, too — apart from when it came to his late work (made roughly between the mid-1830s and his death in 1851), which received a fair share of disparagement. Typical was the verdict of the novelist and art critic William Makepeace Thackeray, who in 1839 declared Turner’s imagery ‘for the most part quite incomprehensible to me’.

This was an artist ahead of his time, however, and the qualities panned by Thackeray et al have been the very ones praised by critics and fans posthumously. The bold colouring, the investigations in light, and the deconstruction of form — all revolutionised the way we look at a painted image, paving the way for the Impressionist movement later in the 19th century and the Abstract Expressionists in the mid-20th. (‘We are all descended from the Englishman Turner,’ said Camille Pissarro.)

In 1966, Turner was granted the rare honour, for an artist born in the 18th century, of being given a one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Called Turner: Imagination and Reality, this landmark show hailed the artist as an abstractionist avant la lettre. Among the keenest visitors was Mark Rothko, who quipped that ‘that chap Turner learned a lot from me’.

‘He lived to paint. Nothing else mattered’ — biographer Eric Shanes

Fast-forward to 2025, and one reason for Turner’s ongoing popularity is ‘simply the fact that his pictures are so beautiful. It’s a pleasure to look at them.’ So says Cecilia Powell, editor of Turner Society News (a biannual magazine published by the London-based Turner Society, an organisation aimed at boosting appreciation of the artist’s work). ‘There is an emphasis nowadays on the idea of art as therapy, on the idea that looking at art is good for the soul,’ Powell adds. ‘I think Turner’s pictures fit right into that trend, too.’

It’s worth noting that the Turner Society was founded in the mid-1970s as a campaign body. Its objective was the establishment of a dedicated gallery to house the works bequeathed by the artist to the British nation: the so-called Turner Bequest. That objective was met in 1987, when the Clore Gallery was built. Part of Tate Britain, this shows 100 works at any one time, in a display drawn from a choice of 300 oil paintings and several thousand sketches and watercolours. (Tate owns the largest collection of Turners in the world.)

Turner is widely referred to as a Romantic artist, in part because of his artistic style but also because of his modus vivendi: he never married, and enjoyed living, working and travelling alone. According to one of his recent biographers, Eric Shanes, ‘he lived to paint. Nothing else mattered.’ (In the name of a good picture, Turner reportedly even tied himself to a ship’s mast for four hours during a sea storm, his close-quarters experience resulting in the 1842 painting Snow Storm — Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth.)

We should be wary of foisting upon Turner the stereotype of solitary genius, though. ‘He was a polymath, engaged with the world around him and with the latest currents of thought,’ says Amy Concannon, senior curator of historic British art at Tate.

Turner talked science with Michael Faraday; discussed poetry with Walter Scott, whose work he also illustrated; kept abreast of politics and world events; and knew lots about architecture and ancient history.

What’s more, two of his most beloved paintings reveal a fascination with new technology and industrialisation: The Fighting Temeraire (of a veteran tall-masted warship being towed by a steam tug to be scrapped) and Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway (of a steam train hurtling towards us across Maidenhead Railway Bridge).

‘Turner had an interest in everything,’ Concannon says, ‘and those multiple interests materialise in his art. He was so wide-ranging that, whatever you’re into, you’re sure to find something in Turner’s work to connect with. Most obviously, his expression of our smallness as humans within the universe, which resonates in an era of climate change today.’

Turner is being celebrated in numerous ways this year, and for numerous reasons. Even on his 250th birthday, he shows no signs of growing old.

Old Masters Parts I & II take place on 1 and 2 July 2025 at Christie’s in London, as part of Classic Week

For further info on ‘Turner 250’, visit tate.org.uk/art/turner-250