J.M.W. Turner
Romance and Reality
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
March 29 - July 27, 2025
Dort, or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed, 1818
Oil on canvas, 62 × 92 inches (157.5 × 233.7 cm)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1977.14.77.
Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne: Morning, ca. 1845
Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches (91.4 x 121.9 cm)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1977.14.79.
The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) presents J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality beginning March 29, when the museum reopens following a two-year closure for a major conservation project. Born 250 years ago, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was one of the most virtuosic and complex artists of nineteenth-century England. This exhibition will draw from the Center’s rich holdings of the artist’s work, encompassing all media and phases of his nearly sixty-year career. This is the first show at the YCBA to focus on Turner in more than thirty years, displaying the complete arc of his radical artistic evolution. The exhibition examines the contradictory nature of this revolutionary figure, who was as inspired by the past luminaries of the European landscape tradition as he was determined to surpass their greatest achievements.
“We are thrilled to welcome visitors back to the museum to reconnect with our extraordinary collections,” said Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director. “Turner is an artist whose groundbreaking works continue to inspire. His work has long been a cornerstone of our collection and we are excited to show our returning and new visitors the full range of our Turner holdings.”“The reopening of the museum on the eve of the 250th anniversary of Turner’s birth offers a timely opportunity to commemorate the unmatched range of one of Britain’s most innovative artists,” said Lucinda Lax, Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the YCBA. “Turner revolutionized the genre of landscape painting in ways that continue to captivate contemporary audiences. This exhibition provides a wide-ranging overview of his transformative practice, beginning with his early meticulously rendered topographical views and ending with the evocative impressions of the natural world from his later years.”
Romance and Reality features some of the museum’s most iconic oil paintings. From Turner’s luminous masterpiece Dort, or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed (1818) to the atmospheric, nearly abstract landscape Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne: Morning (ca. 1845), Turner developed a highly personal vision through his depictions of the landscape. Alongside these two major works, the exhibition will include outstanding watercolors and prints, as well as the artist’s only complete sketchbook outside of the British Isles. Together they reveal not only his astounding technical skill but also the powerful combination of his profound idealism with his acute awareness of the tragic realities of human life.
Staffa, Fingal's Cave, exhibited 1832
Oil on canvas, 35 3/4 x 47 3/4 inches (90.8 x 121.3 cm)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1978.43.14.
Turner’s celebrated later painting Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (1831–32) opens this exhibition on the third floor of the museum—a space designed especially for the display of light-sensitive, rarely seen works on paper. This iconic image typifies the artist’s expressive handling of paint, while his confident marshaling of a series of recurring motifs—most notably a storm-ridden sea—enables him to evoke intense emotions and articulate stunning visual effects. His enduring fascination with representing the vastness of the sea was indelibly shaped by his time in the coastal town of Margate and spans his entire career, from his first oil painting of a maritime subject exhibited in 1796 to his economical drawings of the English coast in the “Channel Sketchbook” (ca. 1845), a treasure of the museum’s collection that is also on display in this show.
The exhibition unfolds in six thematic sections. These offer multiple insights into the rigor of his training as a draftsman, his relentless drive to outstrip his predecessors, his technical achievements, and his growing obsession with conveying light and atmosphere, as well as the sense of tragedy that tinged his later works. A broad selection of prints will illuminate the artist’s deep engagement with this medium, embodied in his ample notations for engravers, while his contributions to commercially successful print series enable visitors to glimpse his shrewd business acumen. With his “Little Liber” series (ca. 1824–26)—a body of prints apparently produced independently by the artist but never published—Turner expanded the tonal possibilities of the mezzotint, achieving new pictorial depths. Dramatic watercolor paintings such as his sublime Vesuvius in Eruption (1818), with its spectacular shower of molten magma, demonstrate his ability to render awe-inspiring scenes from the natural world with intensity and imagination without precedent in this medium. As a whole, the exhibition will convey a nuanced understanding of Turner’s artistic legacy, revealing with new clarity the tensions and contradictions that underlie his daring and brilliant oeuvre.
In spring 2026, the acclaimed oil painting Dort, or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed (1818), along with a selection of other works by Turner, will be on loan to the Dordrechts Museum in the Netherlands. This will mark the first time that the Dort will be seen by audiences outside of North America and the UK.
About J. M. W. Turner
Born in the bohemian London district of Covent Garden to a barber and wigmaker, Turner began painting as a child. His early watercolor paintings of English monuments and landscapes reflect the precision of his initial training as an architectural topographer. By age fourteen, he started attending classes at the Royal Academy, considered Britain’s most prestigious artistic institution. He remained active with the academy throughout his career, becoming a full member by age twenty-six and assuming the role of Professor of Perspective only five years later. Over his six-decade career, he traveled extensively within England and around many countries in continental Europe, making hundreds of sketches on the spot. These drawings—admirable in their own right—were the source for some of his most extraordinary oil paintings. Following his death in 1851, three hundred oil paintings and more than twenty thousand works on paper entered the collection of the Tate Gallery in London by his bequest.
Related Publications
Turner, the inaugural installment in the YCBA’s Collection Series of illustrated books, explores the museum’s outstanding Turner holdings—the largest outside the United Kingdom—in a manner that engages the general reader and expert alike. Authored by Ian Warrell with an essay by Gillian Forrester, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career, places the works within their historical and cultural context, and includes many new discoveries regarding the identification of locations, landscapes, and dates. It includes six sections of beautifully reproduced plates.
Published by the Yale Center for British Art
Hardcover, 208 pages, 93 color illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-300-27584-1
Publication date: February 27, 2024
Turner’s Last Sketchbook is a facsimile of the artist’s last known intact sketchbook, now in the YCBA collection. Turner used it on the coast of the English Channel in Kent, in and around Margate, from June to September 1845. A poem by Tracey Emin (b. 1963), expressing her personal connection with Turner’s work, accompanies this book. Emin grew up in Margate, the seaside town that Turner returned to time and again to draw. Fittingly, J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality will coincide with the exhibition Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning, on view at the YCBA from March 29 through August 10, 2025.
YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART
1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut
