Turner at 250: The Best Anniversary Exhibitions

Turner and Constable

Tate Britain, London, November 27, 2025–April 12, 2026

The year’s blockbuster exhibition is being saved until November but for a very good reason. By running into 2026, the 250th anniversary of John Constable‘s birth, the Tate sets up an unmissable comparison between the two greats of British landscape painting. The men and their work could hardly be more different—lowly born Londoner versus rural gentry, inveterate traveller versus lover of Suffolk, high drama versus peaceful countryside. Yet both men wanted to portray nature as honestly as they could.

The curators could play this either way, as a head-to-head battle or a meeting of Romantic landscape minds. Hopefully, they will also tackle some preconceptions: Turner was not all swirling atmosphere, and Constable, as his Stonehenge shows, was not all pretty pastureland. In any case, this is a must-see, which will feature some of the greatest art ever produced in Britain.

Turner’s Kingdom: Beauty, Birds, and Beasts

Turner’s House, Twickenham, London, April 23–October 26, 2025

From the biggest exhibition to probably the smallest. It might surprise you to know that Turner initially trained as an architectural draughtsman and was a close friend of John Soane, one of the leading designers of the period. Inspired by Soane, Turner built himself a house in 1813, Sandycombe Lodge, in Twickenham, on the outskirts of London. Until 1826, it served as a rural, riverside retreat for him and his father. The house continues as a museum today and is always worth a visit to get an insight into the man behind the paintings.

This year, it will be hosting an anniversary exhibition, focusing on the artist’s interest in the natural world. A great fisherman and a lover of the countryside, Turner travelled widely and painted the animals and plants he encountered. This is a quirky little exhibition in a unique venue, but it has some big loans, including rarely seen watercolors.

Impressions in Watercolour

Holburne Museum, Bath, May 23–August 31, 2025

Turner was a prolific watercolorist at a time when the medium was experiencing a boom in popularity. This exhibition, subtitled Turner and his Contemporaries, encompasses landscapes by artists like John Sell Cotman and Thomas Girtin, as well as works by Turner. Due to their fragile and light-sensitive nature, watercolors are rarely on display, and these works are coming from a private collection, so they will be even less familiar.

It will probably not be a large show, and it will certainly be quiet and understated, but the Holburne is a beautiful venue with a fine 18th-century collection of its own. Equally, as the title suggests, the curators are convinced you will be wowed by the experimental, impressionistic nature of these works on paper. Contextualizing Turner with his more conservative contemporaries will emphasize just how radical his work could be.

J. M. W. Turner: In Light and Shade

Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, February 7–November 2, 2025

There are more watercolors in Manchester, this time contextualized by Turner’s mammoth series of prints, published over 12 years, 1807–1819, as the Liber Studiorum. It is fair to say that Turner’s early work is less well known than his late, large oils. Equally, his output on paper is much less familiar, and his graphic work even less so. It seems almost counterintuitive for an artist so interested in color to produce such an extensive range of work in monochrome.

The Whitworth last presented this exhibition a century ago, and it is deliberately showing all 71 prints in the series, so this is an impressively scholarly exercise. Anyone interested in printmaking will find the ways Turner transposes light and atmosphere from brushwork to line fascinating. The whole project is a testimony to the importance he placed on landscape, and there is something uniquely powerful in Turner’s ability to distill nature down to its essence, in just light and shade.

Turner’s The Battle of Trafalgar

National Maritime Museum, London, from October 21, 2025

This is less an exhibition than a re-display. Turner’s only royal commission, and his biggest canvas at over 2.6 x 3.6 m (8 ft 6 15⁄16 in. x 12 ft 1 1⁄16 in.), is a huge draw at Greenwich, London. Turner is of course well known for his seascapes, but he also produced a number of history paintings—combining landscape and narrative as a way of elevating the status of his representations of nature.

Trafalgar is unusual in that nature takes a back seat, as the whole painting focuses on the HMS Victory and presents a montage series of events from the course of the battle. Victory‘s tattered and billowing sails take on an emotive presence, rather like surrogate clouds, and the whole foreground was controversially given over to the human cost of the battle.  This is well worth seeing as a different side of Turner’s art.

Turner’s Vision at Petworth

Petworth House, Petworth, West Sussex, June 21–November 16, 2025

As well as royal patrons, Turner enjoyed the support of many of the nobility, including the Earl of Egremont. The artist was a regular visitor to the Earl’s home at Petworth and used his visits to record the house and parkland. What began as a transactional relationship, when Turner was first commissioned in 1809, developed into a close friendship. Turner ended up having his own painting room at the house.

Petworth is now owned by the National Trust but many of Turner’s paintings of it are in the Tate’s collection. This exhibition is reuniting house and art for the first time in a generation. Alongside these loans, you can see other great examples from Petworth’s own collection, which has 20 oils by Turner—the largest collection outside the Tate.

Austen and Turner

Harewood House, Harewood, West Yorkshire, May 2–October 19, 2025

Another country house, but a very different exhibition. This might be the most unusual of Turner’s anniversary celebrations. Harewood House, a spectacular venue in its own right, is imagining a dialogue between Jane Austen and Turner in A Country House Encounter. Harewood already has Austen’s first editions and Turner’s paintings of the estate and it promises loans, fashion, and artefacts to illustrate how both producers represented the English country house.

2025 is also the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, so although the exhibition may seem slightly eccentric, in reality, it is an interesting and justifiable juxtaposition of two of the great figures of early 19th-century British culture. I am not sure they would have got on in real life, but country estate living is central to Austen’s writing, and landed patrons played an important role in Turner’s early career. It should be fascinating.

Turner: Always Contemporary

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, October 25, 2025–February 22, 2026

Turner’s lasting influence is the subject of this survey exhibition, which takes in artists as diverse as Claude Monet and Bridget Riley. The curators are also looking at Turner’s continued relevance, considering themes like climate, migration and tourism. At the heart is a series of oils, watercolors, and drawings from the collections of Liverpool museums, plus some loans and contemporary pieces.

Arguably this is one of the most interesting exhibitions on offer this year. An equally broad approach can be found at Newcastle’s Laing Gallery where they are looking at landscape painting in Scotland and the North of England: Romance to Realities: The Northern Landscape and Shifting Identities (until April 26, 2025). In both cases, Turner is the hook on which to hang a whole range of art—whatever you like there will be something to appeal to you.

There are, of course, plenty of places you can see Turner’s masterpieces at any time. The Fighting Temeraire is one of a handful of his works in the National Gallery, but across London, Tate Britain devotes an entire wing to some of the 300 or so paintings he left to the country on his death. Turner was prolific, long-lived, and incredibly varied. From precisely rendered, picturesque ruins, to airy, abstracted oils which seem to belong more in the 20th than the 19th century, you will find something to love during Turner 250. The year 2025 is the time to get out and discover the marvelous Mr. Turner.