The second birth of JMW Turner

At the end of his career his peers found his paintings incomprehensible.

John Ruskin thought his late work displayed “distinctive characters in the execution, indicative of mental disease” For the last five years of his life he had been living with a woman named Sophia Booth , a twice-widowed guesthouse landlady 20 years his junior.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of Turner ’s birth, an event being celebrated with a flurry of exhibitions across the country.

Turner started out as a topographical draughtsman of rare refinement, able to capture in watercolour not just the detail but the evocativeness of Tintern Abbey four years before Wordsworth .

The mature Turner was never a painter of line but always one of mass, tone and light.

Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps was first exhibited in 1812 and remains one of his most celebrated works.

The potency and resonance of these pictures was not recognised fully for a century after his death.