Galleries - May 2024

A World of Care: Turner and the Environment Saturday 6th July - Sunday 27th October 2024 - Turner’s House hosts first exhibition dedicated to J.M.W. Turner and the environment - - Artist’s groundbreaking paintings, drawings and prints take on new meaning and urgency - Turner’s House, thanks to a generous loan of works from Tate, asserts J.M.W. Turner was the first major British artist to engage with man’s effect on the natural world. The exhibition reveals how Turner grappled with the effects of the industrial revolution on the landscape, and captured environmental and social developments that would go on to change Britain and the world‘s climates forever. A World of Care presents a selection of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings, drawings and prints in relation to a series of environmental issues. It shows how 200 years ago Turner bore witness to the beginnings of societal and industrial developments that would lead to today’s ecological concerns. Turner, - arguably Britain’s most celebrated landscape painter - was the first British artist of the Anthropocene: the current geological age in which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Highly attuned to changes in the landscape and atmosphere, Turner captured them in his groundbreaking paintings, drawings and engravings. Through his art, he documented plumes of smoke, burning furnaces, urban sprawl, deforested landscapes, overfishing and extreme weather. A World of Care radically reframes Turner’s work. Staged in the artist’s own home, the exhibition connects the past to the present and expands our understanding of Turner’s subject matter, worldview and vision. It encourages visitors to look at Turner’s paintings in a new way, provoked by ecological concern. A World of Care: Turner and the Environment , Saturday 6th July - Sunday 27th October 2024, Wednesday to Sunday 10am to 4pm, for more information visit turnershouse.org Sunset 1830-35 J.M.W. Turner Copyright Tate