Turner’s oeuvre is vast, wonderful and varied. During his long artistic career he produced hundreds of large paintings, thousands of drawings and watercolours and around 300 notebooks. Most of his works survive and became the property of the nation after his death in 1851. Most of the approximately 30,000 pieces of the Turner Bequest are now held at the Tate. This immense pool of works makes it perhaps impossible to provide anything akin to a retrospective of Turner’s art and requires each new exhibition and display to have a focus or a theme. Visitor numbers prove that the demand for and interest in Turner is not waning. 2011 and 2012 were good years for Turner exhibitions and displays around the country, including the opening of a substantial new gallery in Margate, Turner Contemporary, named after him in recognition of his connection with the seaside town. The Royal Academy is highlighting the genre of landscape painting and it relation to the print market in Turner’s age with Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape (8 December 2012 to 17 February 2013 – see review for BSECS by John Chu). 2013 will be another fruitful year for Turner events and exhibitions, beginning with this one at Petworth and complemented later in the year by another at Brighton’s Royal Pavilion celebrating the purchase of a long-lost important watercolour from the 1820s. 

The Petworth exhibition focusses quite appropriately on Turner’s fascination with the county of Sussex and is partly informed by the patronage Turner enjoyed at Petworth and from the Sussex MP John ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller at Rosehill, Brightling. But crucially, it does more than that. Despite, or perhaps because of, its necessary focus, it provides a very good overview of Turner’s range of interests, methods, materials, media and styles, whilst managing to illuminate the social and cultural circumstances Turner worked in, especially with regard to transport, print media and patronage. On entering the main exhibition space of Turner’s Sussex, a low-ceilinged room in the long servants’ wing that runs parallel to the grand house, one might be tempted to call this a small exhibition. But size does not matter here, and the initial impression is misleading. This is a newly refurbished, dedicated gallery space in an area of the Petworth estate where not much of the original interior survives, but the room is nevertheless of great relevance to Petworth House and Turner’s work.

Petworth in West Sussex was the seat of one of Turner’s greatest patrons, George Wyndham, the 3rd Earl of Egremont (1751-1837), a keen patron of the arts and an avid collector of paintings and sculpture. In 1824, around the time when Turner was most active in Sussex, the Earl greatly extended the top-lit purpose-built art gallery at the north end of Petworth House, to create space for his ever-increasing collection. In the 1820s and 30s he invited Turner to stay for long periods at Petworth and commissioned a total of twenty paintings. These paintings are still in the collection of Petworth House and can be seen in their original locations in the house as part of Turner’s Sussex. The house, which is now managed by the National Trust, is normally closed during the winter months, but visitors to the Turner exhibition can go to the rooms where the Turner paintings are hung, including the North Gallery, the Red Room (formerly known as the Turner Room) and the spectacular Carved Room. The latter was restored to the 3rd Earl’s arrangement in the early 2000s and includes four important Turner oils of idyllic Sussex views, incorporated at low level into Grinling Gibbons’ carved wall decorations, so that dinner guests could admire them easily while sitting at the table. The grounds are also accessible and visitors can retrace Turner’s steps in Capability Brown’s landscaped garden and compare today’s vistas with his picturesque views of the estate. 

Transforming historically important spaces in or near great historic buildings into flexible exhibition spaces is laudable, sensible, and allows for curatorial projects like these, where themed exhibitions can be staged in the right context and the right conditions with regard to security and conservation. The same has been done at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, where, in the absence of surviving original features, the Prince Regent’s early private apartments on the top floor have been turned into a gallery for special exhibitions. Reusing space in this way gives curators the opportunity to display fragile and light-sensitive objects such as Turner’s works on paper in appropriate cases and with adjustable lighting systems without interfering with historic decorative schemes. There is also the option of extending the display by creating a trail that points visitors to other parts of the estate, inviting them to explore and understand different views and angles. This is particularly important in the case of Turner’s picturesque views of Petworth and Sussex. 

Allowing visitors to see some paintings in their original context, after having visited the clear and scholarly display of the 40 works in the servants’ wing, adds significantly to the understanding of historic interiors, connoisseurship and patronage in the early nineteenth century and was an excellent curatorial decision. The curator Andrew Loukes is House and Collections Manager at Petworth, and thus has a profound knowledge of how collections and objects work in historic buildings. For the main display he has gathered many of Turner’s Sussex and Petworth paintings, on loan from museums such as the Tate, the V&A, the British Museum and other collections, as well as three of his Sussex sketchbooks, dating from the 1810s and 1820s. The 3rd Earl of Egremont had very particular and refined collecting habits and only ever purchased finished oil paintings by Turner, not bothering with the many sketches on paper Turner produced during his residency. Some of these have thus returned to the estate for the first time, along with works from other visits to Sussex or from other commissions, such as views of Ashburnham, Rosehill, Hastings, Brighton, Shoreham and Lewes. The exhibition labels and the small catalogue explain the variety of formats and media Turner worked in, from early topographical views which were probably copied from other artists’ works, to the 3rd Earl’s own copy of the Liber Studiorum, a series of 71 prints published in parts between 1807 and 1819, displayed here in their original format, loosely stitched together in blue wrappers. The familiar and popular Petworth oil Dewy Morning from 1810 forms a focal point and is a prime example of a romantic image of a great building nestled in a landscaped park, but the smaller drawings are equally important and well chosen. Of particular poignancy are a number of small gouaches, quickly drawn on blue paper, preferred by Turner and many other romantic artists. Here we have Turner embracing immediacy and abstraction rather than carefully arranged picturesque and topographical views. These small sketches reveal his love for colour and light and provide an insight into how he worked and what inspired him. This is an extremely well-curated exhibition staged with sense and elegance in a historically evocative and relevant context.