An oft-repeated phrase from the essayist William Hazlitt describes J.M.W. Turner’s work as “pictures of nothing, and very like”. Indeed, particularly in his later work, Turner’s forms regularly dissolve into one another, or into thin air, almost to the point of abstraction. Curated by Ian Warrell, one of the world’s leading Turner authorities, Turner from the Tate presents over 40 oil paintings and 60 watercolours by this English Romantic master painter who started exhibiting in the window of his father’s barber shop as a child. At the end of his life in 1851, Turner left more than 19,000 watercolours, drawings and oils to the British nation, many of which are housed at the London’s Tate Gallery.

Images of man and the modern industrial world (ships, bridges, trains) combined with natural phenomena in all their terror and beauty make up the majority of Turner’s oeuvre. There are anecdotal stories of the artist rushing out to witness a blazing fire or tying himself to a ship’s mast during a violent storm. Although practising at a time when the formal qualities of painting were prioritised, he often cast aside formulaic rules of perspective and balance and instead employed a chromatic palette and broad...