The 250th anniversary of J.M.W. Turner’s birth has occasioned a group of exhibitions reconsidering the artist’s legacy. Many of these exhibitions aim to position Turner in relation both to his antecedents and to the artists who followed him in time and style. ‘Turner in Time’, for instance, opening on 22 November at the Whitworth, Manchester, promises at once ‘a visual journey through the evolution of [Turner’s] style’ and an exploration of his artistic legacy, drawing on the gallery’s extensive collection of watercolours. An exhibition at Towner Eastbourne, also focusing on Turner’s watercolours, seeks to place him ‘amongst his notable contemporaries’, while the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool insists that Turner is ‘Always Contemporary’. If this anniversary offers galleries such as these a welcome chance to open up their collections in order to explore relation and influence, it can also be an opportunity to consider the nature and the implications of artistic influence and to think through what distinguishes Turner from his contemporaries. The two exhibitions I visited, at the Towner and the Walker, approach this question in very different ways and yield dramatically different answers.
‘Impressions in Watercolour: J.M.W. Turner and his Contemporaries’, which opened at the Holburne Museum in May and is now at the Towner, with some variations, is billed as an opportunity to view Turner at ‘his most experimental and gestural’. At times it is. In A Boat near a Buoy in a Rough Sea (c. 1830), the dark splodge of the titular boat barely frees itself from the blue of the paper on which it is painted, pushing hard against the limits of representational painting. If the intense red of the buoy at bottom right, painted in gouache, marks shallows or wreckage, its primary purpose for the viewer is to ward off pure abstraction.
However, across the three rooms that comprise the exhibition, the strength of the Towner’s holdings, bolstered by loans from a private collection, lies in works by Turner’s contemporaries. Indeed, Turner is little seen until the final room. This is no bad thing, since it enables the curators to tell a story about Turner’s artistic milieu. His nearly abstract seascapes can be tested against those of his imitators and inheritors. For instance, Henry George Hine’s Colliers Unloading by Moonlight at Eastbourne (1883) is as interested in light as any Turner work while possessing a dreamy stasis that makes clear Turner’s genius for drawing movement and energy out of comparable materials. Or compare Richard Henry Nibbs’s Newhaven (n.d.), which replicates the subject and composition of The Fighting Temeraire (1839) but gives it the fastidiously representational burnish of a maritime genre painter.
Such comparisons are not always unflattering. John Sell Cotman’s Bedlam Furnace at Coalbrookdale(c. 1802) on display at the Towner, in which a sunrise silhouettes the stacks of an iron forge in Coalbrookdale, anticipates later industrial studies, such as Turner’s Dudley, Worcestershire (c. 1830–33), held in the Walker. In both, the rays of a new dawn are like X-rays irradiating the foreground; in Bedlam Furnace, they render a tree’s broken trunk as translucent as its leaves. Curatorial guidance at the Towner is minimal and, moving through the exhibition as a whole, the viewer feels distinctions between Turner and his contemporaries hardening and softening as new comparisons are introduced. While it is not finally clear what the curators of this exhibition take Turner’s singular contribution to be, perhaps unsettling persistent assumptions about the distinctiveness of this artist is the point.
If the exhibition at Towner is cautious about pinning Turner down, ‘Turner: Always Contemporary’ at the Walker is emphatic that Turner’s signature indistinctness provides a key to his relationship to other artists. Of course, indistinctness remains in part a matter of style – Turner’s influence on, for instance, the Impressionists, including Monet and Camille and Lucien Pissarro, who saw his work at the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) in 1871, is represented here by Monet’s Break-up of the Ice on the Seine, Near Bennecourt (1893). The curators, however, repeatedly push the consideration of style in interesting directions. An anonymous copy of The Fighting Temeraire, originally mistakenly thought to be a sketch by Turner made immediately after witnessing the depicted scene, is displayed adjacent to Bertha Mary Garnett’s A Corner of the Turner Room in the National Gallery (1883), showing The Fighting Temeraire in the process of being copied by an art student. This grouping evokes the economy of copying and imitation in which Turner worked. Indeed, Turner’s own early imitations of Dutch marine paintings are hung nearby.
Questions of replication and imitation in the gallery are often settled as matters of influence or inspiration. But at the Walker they are shown just as often to be matters of commerce. As the curators explain, ‘Turner was as passionate about selling his art as he was about making it’ – an understanding of his approach to art that skilfully reframes the commercial copying of Turner’s work across biscuit tins and stamps, handbags and a pair of (truly unsightly) Dr. Martens. At the same time, viewers are invited to notice mass production and commodity culture as themes of Turner’s paintings. Thus, the porcelain cup depicted in Richmond Hill (c. 1825) is drawn out of the frame, as it were, when placed next to a series of objects ranging from an exquisitely delicate 18th-century soft-paste porcelain mug to Christine Borland’s English Family China (1998), a set of ceramic skulls cast from life that evoke histories of colonialism and enslavement. Such curatorial choices make clear that the paintings in this exhibition are themselves commodities deeply entangled in systems of exploitation and obligation. This is especially true of the many objects in the gallery and the exhibition that were collected by William Hesketh Lever, whose wealth came in part from his involvement in the atrocities of the Belgian Congo.
Accused by art collector James Lenox of ‘indistinctness’ in the mid 19th century, Turner supposedly replied: ‘Indistinctness is my forte’. Except he didn’t. He said ‘indistinctness is my fault’, a remark that nevertheless remains indistinctly poised between denial and acceptance. Indistinctness has long been acknowledged as Turner’s signature style. However, ‘Turner: Always Contemporary’ finds indistinctness to be a core principle of his painting and not just a stylistic effect. The many forms of indistinctness on display here, moreover, swim into view thanks to some superbly creative curation. In this way, Turner’s best work is always unfinished.
‘Impressions in Watercolour: J.M.W. Turner and his Contemporaries’ is at Towner Eastbourne until 12 April 2026. ‘Turner: Always Contemporary’ is at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, until 22 February 2026.