Mr Turner – paintings and place - A celebration of the artist’s life and art

Marking the 250th year of his birth, this tour celebrates Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), one of the greatest and most beloved of European landscape and marine painters. The tour offers privileged access to a variety of sites, great and small, associated with the artist in this landmark year. Seeking a closer understanding of the man in the context of his times, we explore his work, friendships and places of significance. This will be an immersion into Turner’s life as well as art: from his humble beginnings as the child of a Covent Garden wigmaker, to his last resting place, St Paul’s Cathedral, as the nation’s celebrated son.

Viewing in situ masterpieces such as The Fighting Temeraire (1839 National Gallery) – Turner’s ‘darling’ and voted the UK’s favourite painting in 2005 – we will also enter the late-Georgian era via the portals of the idiosyncratic house museum created by Turner’s close friend and fellow Royal Academician, Sir John Soane (1753–1837). This was in turn the inspiration for the artist’s own bequest to the British nation (38,000 individual finished and unfinished works of art, drawings and sketches, now housed at Tate Britain and the National Gallery) and Turner’s own home, a villa which overlooked a picturesque section of the River Thames at Richmond, now in the leafy suburb of Twickenham, which he designed and built as a retreat from his busy commercial studio and gallery in Marylebone.

We will also venture to Petworth House, East Sussex, the magnificent 17th-century stately home of Turner’s patron Lord Egremont, where the artist was a regular house guest for over 20 years, painting interiors and landscapes within the Capability Brown deer park. Evening lectures will explore how Turner’s life and legacy has inspired artists over the centuries and in a variety of media.