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'The father of modern art' John Ruskin, 1843 In comparison with his contemporary, the artist John Constable, success came relatively early to Turner, in the form of a group of wealthy patrons willing to buy and commission work, give him hospitality, and to fund his studies abroad. There were, however, hostile reviews of his work, particularly of his biggest public statements in oil paint. Sir George Beaumont attacked his luminous palette and his use of colour. By contrast, his work in watercolour remained universally admired throughout his career.

Bridge in the Middle Distance 1808, from the Liber Studiorum © Tate, London 2002

From the later 1830s onwards, one of his most ardent admirers was John Ruskin, who also became an enthusiastic collector and whose book, Modern Painters, published from 1843-60, was an important contribution to the development of Turner's reputation. Ruskin was among the few contemporaries who admired Turner's late style; from around 1840 onwards his work had as many critics as admirers, and was frequently ridiculed. Nevertheless, he was still, in his later years, the most celebrated painter in England and also had a notable reputation abroad.

Turner was always very aware of factors which affected his reputation and made full use of the wide circulation offered by print publishing to spread knowledge of his achievements. From 1807 he published a series of landscape prints known as the Liber Studiorum ('Book of Studies'), which demonstrated his abilities in every area of landscape art. He was concerned to control his posthumous reputation and, despite his neglect of the physical state of his gallery in Queen Anne Street, he bequeathed its contents to the British nation as the basis of a memorial gallery to be built in his honour. He also asked that two of his paintings, Dido Building Carthage and Sun rising through Vapour: Fishermen cleaning and selling Fish, should hang in the National Gallery beside the work of the Old Master painter he most admired: Claude Lorrain (1604/5 - 1682). These two works, and seven other pictures, have remained there, even though the rest of the Turner Bequest is now at Tate Britain.

Turner's reputation has changed over time, partly because different generations have had access to different examples of his work. In the early years after his death it was mostly his finished paintings that were shown in public, and only later, into the twentieth century, that works such as Norham Castle, unexhibited in his lifetime, became widely known. The loose brushwork and vibrant colouring of his late work came to be seen as vital steps in the development of modernism, regardless of whether or not Turner had intended them to be seen in public. More recently, emphasis has been placed less on his supposedly modernist credentials, and more on the way in which he looked back to, and continued, the tradition of European history painting.

A major boost to Turner's posthumous reputation came in the 1970s, at the bi-centenary of his birth, when the Royal Academy mounted a great exhibition of his work, which became one of the first modern 'block-busters'. This increased public pressure for a gallery devoted to Turner's work resulting, in 1987, in the opening of the Clore Gallery, on the Tate's Millbank site. Tate Britain, as it has since become, now houses the entire Turner Bequest, the vast array of paintings, prints and drawings which the artist left to the nation.