JMW Turner’s 250th birthday - Pick your favourites of Britain’s greatest painter

Turner’s 250th birthday is celebrated in 2025.  Born 23 April.

Jackie Wullschläger (see below) has written a wonderful essay about why JMW Turner still excites and enthrals us. Comparing him to the post-impressionist artist; “Turner and Van Gogh painted what they imagined”. 

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Top 10 Turner paintings

1. Venice, Noon (1845)

2. Fishermen at Sea   (only 21 y/o when painted this)

3. Caligula’s Palace and Bridge (1831)

4. Norham Castle, Sunrise

5. Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps

6. The Fighting Temeraire

7. Regulus

9. The Shipwreck

10. Frosty Morning

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Wullschläger writing in “Turner at 250 — why is he so beloved?” (FT):

The immediate answer is that the pictures are deeply pleasurable. As museums tend towards the conceptual and political, Turner guarantees painterly delight. His impact is instant and sensuous, his themes vast and inclusive: man and nature, present versus past, the rise and fall of empires. He engages and immerses.

Turner is theatrical, and also ambivalent — so we go on talking about him. His most political painting, “The Slave Ship”, subsumes man’s inhumanity to man into a tempest where, dashed with maimed bodies thrown overboard, a violent lurid ocean “burns like gold, and bathes like blood,” wrote Ruskin.

In painting, he did both. His idol, 17th-century painter Claude Lorrain, inspired his ambition, monumentality and grandeur. But coming of age during the French Revolution, Turner belongs to romanticism’s disorder. Smashing Claude’s classical equilibrium, he created pictures for a churning industrialising age, uncertain of its relationship with the natural world, thus newly fixated on landscape in painting and poetry — Turner’s peers are Constable (born 1776), Wordsworth (1770) and Coleridge (1772).

When Turner finally reached Italy in 1819, he was over 40, and responded not to its classical tropes (he was a hopeless figure painter) but to its radiant light. From then on, a golden luminosity suffused and heightened his paintings, not only of Italy — though his Venice views, converging shifting watery effects with themes of imperial decline, have a special elegiac beauty. 

The 19th-century age of materialism and realism, when artists from Constable to Monet insisted they painted their own visual experience, is fascinatingly bracketed by Turner and Van Gogh, who painted what they imagined. Van Gogh’s agitated spirals are descendants of Turner’s spinning vortices — a direct line felt if you go from the National Gallery’s Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers exhibition to the Clore.

Both Turner and Van Gogh were northern European artists who found their fullest expression under the Mediterranean sun, unprecedentedly raising the colour key to challenge what painting could be. Dazzling, consoling, beguiling, they brighten the winter and troubled times like rare northern lights.