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1: Turner's Legacy
2: From Realism to the 'Impression'
3: Whistler's 'Nocturnes'
4: Painting in Series
5: Turner and the Thames
6: Return to the Thames
7: Venice
Room 1: Turner's Legacy
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Room 1: Turner's Legacy
Tate Photography
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When Turner died in 1851 he was widely seen as the greatest landscape
painter Britain had ever produced. This room contains examples of
his work which could be seen in public during the decades after his
death, transmitting his influence to a later generation of painters,
including Whistler and Monet.
Legal wrangling over Turner's will meant that his
bequest to the nation of about a hundred finished oil paintings
was eventually expanded to include all his unfinished works and
about nineteen thousand watercolours and drawings. Turner's supporter, the critic John Ruskin,
made selections from this vast collection which were exhibited to
the public, though not in the purpose-built gallery which Turner had
hoped for.
Ruskin regarded Turner's watercolours as the peak
of his artistic output. Those shown here are displayed in a way
which echoes the method Ruskin designed for the basement of the
National Gallery, where artists, students and others could examine and copy them. They had a marked
influence on subsequent generations of landscape painters, who strove
to imitate in oils their spontaneity and fluid, transparent veils
of colour.
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View
in Tate Collection