Venice The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore; Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington

“Turner and the Sea” is a major exhibition with many strengths. It is comprehensive, displaying a good selection of Turner’s sea paintings. It ranges from his very earliest portrayals of calm and storm, to his battle scenes, to his water colors and mezzotints, and even his notebooks and unfinished or preliminary works. It culminates with his glorious mastery of the light of the sun, Turner’s god, in the 1830s and terminates with his final, controversial, almost abstract attempts to capture the essential feel of a stormy sea. The exhibition has a strong double historical awareness. It places Turner’s paintings alongside those of earlier artists whom he admired and who influenced him, and includes work by his rivals and contemporaries, who sometimes goaded him into a fierce competitiveness. Among these other works is an unexpected but very fine Coastal Scene (1781) by Thomas Gainsborough. The curators have also realized that a proper understanding of Turner requires placing him in the context of British naval, commercial, and economic history, for this was a time of decisive British military victories at sea and of the creation of the world’s first industrial nation.

The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838 © The National Gallery, London

Over time, smoke and steam came to characterize Turner’s ships, as did the new locomotives and industries found in his landscapes.