Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic \u201cIntroduced today to the man who beyond all doubt is the greatest of the age; greatest in every faculty of the imagination, in every branch of scenic knowledge, at once\u00a0the\u00a0painter and poet of the day.\u201d So wrote 21-year-old John Ruskin on meeting Turner in 1840.\u00a0Recognising Turner as so innovative, different from any painter before, that he demanded a new sort of writing about art, Ruskin championed his hero across five volumes in Modern Painters.\u00a0In rich, allusive prose evocative of the artist\u2019s spectacular atmospheric effects, he declared that by \u201ctruth of tone\u201d and \u201ctruth of colour\u201d Turner conveyed a truth deeper, in imaginative expression, than the most accomplished naturalism. This was the future of modern painting: subjective, visionary, sensational.Turner\u2019s 250th birthday is celebrated in 2025, and still he enthrals. His paintings have become part of British national identity, passing from art to popular culture. In the 2012 movie Skyfall, James Bond and Q meet in front of \u201cThe Fighting Temeraire\u201d, the magnificent ghostly sailing ship about to be broken up for scrap, redundant in the age of steam, embodied in the squat, spewing black tug. The sunset picture, sweeping from flame bright to dark, symbolises Bond\u2019s age and the turning tide of the British intelligence service. For us all, it suggests the journey through life.\u00a0During lockdown, the \u201cTemeraire\u201d and \u201cRain, Steam, and Speed\u201d, the train hurtling towards abstraction in a blur of swirling, sprayed paint, featured in the National Gallery\u2019s top 10 paintings viewed online \u2014 Turner the only artist appearing twice.\u00a0Why is he so beloved?The immediate answer is that the pictures are deeply pleasurable. As museums tend towards the conceptual and political, Turner guarantees painterly delight. His impact is instant and sensuous, his themes vast and inclusive: man and nature,\u00a0present versus past, the rise and fall of empires. He engages and immerses. \u201cMake haste,\u201d wrote Thackeray when \u201cRain, Steam, and Speed\u201d appeared at the Royal Academy, \u201clest it dash out of the picture, and be away up Charing Cross.\u201dTurner belongs to Romanticism\u2019s disorder. Smashing classical equilibrium, he created pictures for a churning industrialising ageTurner is theatrical, and also ambivalent \u2014 so we go on talking about him. His most political painting, \u201cThe Slave Ship\u201d, subsumes man\u2019s inhumanity to man into a tempest where, dashed with maimed bodies thrown overboard, a violent lurid ocean \u201cburns like gold, and bathes like blood,\u201d wrote Ruskin. Does Turner aestheticise terror or bring down the power of nature on the unnatural horror of slavery? Was he patriotic or pessimistic about the British empire? Did he embrace progress (the train) or nostalgia (the sailing ship)?\u00a0In painting, he did both. His idol, 17th-century painter Claude Lorrain, inspired his ambition, monumentality and grandeur. But coming of age during the French Revolution, Turner belongs to romanticism\u2019s disorder. Smashing Claude\u2019s classical equilibrium, he created pictures for a churning industrialising age, uncertain of its relationship with the natural world, thus newly fixated on landscape in painting and poetry \u2014 Turner\u2019s peers are Constable (born 1776), Wordsworth (1770) and Coleridge (1772).The roll call of exhibitions celebrating Turner at 250 begins in Britain with Edinburgh\u2019s recently opened Turner in January. The birthday surprise of this popular annual display of watercolours bequeathed by Henry Vaughan, restricted to January when daylight is weakest, is a first-time swap with Dublin\u2019s similarly preserved, pristine watercolours from Vaughan\u2019s legacy there. The turbulent panorama \u201cEdinburgh from below Arthur\u2019s Seat\u201d has come home, among many arrivals and departures. A favourite Turner setting is the port, stirring feelings of home and adventure, beginnings and endings. In the Plymouth storm watercolour \u201cA Ship against the Mewstone\u201d, the sails are almost horizontal on leaping waves, illuminated against thunderous clouds in a shaft of sunlight: can the boat make it back? In \u201cOstend Harbour\u201d, a lone observer, gazing towards England, watches the tides beneath red-orange skies, shimmering on ivory wove paper.Bath\u2019s Holburne Museum follows with Impressions in Watercolour (May\u2014August). Both shows tell how the medium was far from secondary for Turner; he wanted to capture life \u201con the wing\u201d, he said, and watercolour encouraged the loose, improvisatory experiments in oil depicting fluid, fleeting moments.\u00a0The distinctive, delicate films of colour floating on his canvases are close to watercolour effects.Before Turner, painting was static, highly finished and concerned with events from history; he animated it into the present tense. JMW Turner: Romance and Reality is the title of Yale\u2019s 2025 show (March-July). It stars \u201cThe Dort\u201d, an intricate yet ethereal delineation of an ordinary daily packet boat under glowing, even light.\u00a0Constable thought it \u201cthe most complete work of genius I ever saw\u201d, recalling its \u201ccanal with numerous boats making thousands of beautiful shapes\u201d.\u00a0The paired paintings Turner bequeathed specifically to hang alongside Lorrain\u2019s at the National Gallery claim everyday life is as significant as historical subjects, that individuals anonymous and heroic are equally shadowed by forces of destiny. \u201cSun Rising through Vapour\u201d takes place on a casual morning when fishermen unload their catch by a silvery-white sea \u2014 but phantom-like warships in the mist are warning notes; this is 1807 in Napoleon\u2019s Europe. In \u201cDido Building Carthage\u201d,\u00a0the queen, her architects, builders, merchants, energetically construct the imperial capital whose doom is foretold by her husband\u2019s tomb,\u00a0and by the pathos of children launching flimsy toy boats.\u00a0Most of Turner\u2019s bequest to the nation, hundreds of paintings, has since 1987 lived at Tate Britain\u2019s Clore Gallery, reorganised last year into a marvellous, free, nine-room retrospective. It begins with the brooding moonlit \u201cFisherman at Sea\u201d (1796) \u2014 already Turner aged 21 paints everything in motion, tilting, unpredictable. His sea paintings resonated from the start in our island nation. Now they seem to herald environmental crisis:\u00a0his mighty stagings of man overwhelmed by nature \u2014 the vortex of a blizzard \u201cSnow Storm \u2014 Steam-Boat off a Harbour\u2019s Mouth\u201d \u2014 or our impact on it, for example the predatory \u201cWhalers\u201d.\u00a0The Clore concludes with late landscapes dissolving into light \u2014 \u201cNorham Castle, Sunrise\u201d, \u201cSunrise with Sea Monsters\u201d \u2014 accompanied by a brilliant yellow Mark Rothko abstraction. \u201cThis man Turner, he learnt a lot from me,\u201d Rothko quipped in 1966. The juxtaposition is a corrective. Tate\u2019s division in 2000, separating British works at Millbank from post-1900 global art at Tate Modern, isolated Turner from the sweep of art history \u2014 to which he remains fundamental. His long influence keeps him fresh, sparking constant reappraisal.\u00a0In Dialogues with Turner: Evoking the Sublime (to May) at Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai, the world\u2019s most famous watercolour, \u201cThe Blue Rigi, Sunrise\u201d,\u00a0its iridescent morning star shining on scratched white paper,\u00a0is joined by Olafur Eliasson\u2019s installation \u201cYour Double-Lighthouse Projection\u201d \u2014 the sublime across centuries and different media.\u00a0\u00a0In 2012, Tate Liverpool\u2019s Turner Monet Twombly drew out Turner\u2019s affinities with impressionism, which he heralded (\u201cwe are all descended from the Englishman Turner,\u201d Pissarro admitted), and with Cy Twombly\u2019s semi-abstractions at the turn of the 21st century. Twombly\u2019s inky black \u201cThree Studies from the Temeraire\u201d (1998-99) pays homage to their shared subject of sumptuous ships of death \u2014 Turner\u2019s \u201cPeace \u2014 Burial at Sea\u201d; his funereal gondolas in \u201cSt Benedetto, Looking towards Fusina\u201d.\u00a0So Turner is both our contemporary and siren voice of 19th-century Britain. Tate Britain\u2019s Turner and Constable (from November) will explore the contrasting approaches of the two landscapists who burst on the scene simultaneously in a country with no previous painting achievements comparable to Italy\u2019s Renaissance, the Dutch golden age or French classicism. Perhaps that is the point \u2014 neither were oppressed by tradition, nor, because of the Napoleonic wars, could they make the customary pilgrimage of artistic formation to Italy.\u00a0When Turner finally reached Italy in 1819, he was over 40, and responded not to its classical tropes (he was a hopeless figure painter) but to its radiant light. From then on, a golden luminosity suffused and heightened his paintings, not only of Italy \u2014 though his Venice views, converging shifting watery effects with themes of imperial decline, have a special elegiac beauty.\u00a0The 19th-century age of materialism and realism, when artists from Constable to Monet insisted they painted their own visual experience, is fascinatingly bracketed by Turner and Van Gogh, who painted what they imagined. Van Gogh\u2019s agitated spirals are descendants of Turner\u2019s spinning vortices \u2014 a direct line felt if you go from the National Gallery\u2019s Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers exhibition to the Clore.Both Turner and Van Gogh were northern European artists who found their fullest expression under the Mediterranean sun, unprecedentedly raising the colour key to challenge what painting could be. Dazzling, consoling, beguiling, they brighten the winter and troubled times like rare northern lights.\u2018Turner in January\u2019 is at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, January 1\u201431; \u2018JMW Turner: Romance and Reality\u2019 is at Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, March 29 \u2014 July 27; \u2018Dialogues with Turner, Evoking the Sublime\u2019 is at MAP, Shanghai, to May 10; \u2018Turner and Constable\u2019 is at Tate Britain, London, November 27 \u2014 April 12 2026Find out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic \u201cIntroduced today to the man who beyond all doubt is the greatest of the age; greatest in every faculty of the imagination, in every branch of scenic knowledge, at once\u00a0the\u00a0painter and poet of the day.\u201d So wrote 21-year-old John Ruskin on meeting Turner in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":152206,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-152205","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152207,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152205\/revisions\/152207"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}