Turner & Australia: The Possibilities of Vision

To mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Mallord William Turner RA (1775-1851), arguably the most significant creative figure in the history of British art, Gippsland Art Gallery is staging the exhibition Turner & Australia.

Curated by Gippsland Art Gallery director Simon Gregg, Turner & Australia navigates the enduring influence of J.M.W. Turner on Australian landscape painting, commencing with Turner’s Australian contemporary, the English born John Glover (1767-1849). The exhibition will present the three Turner oils and eight watercolours held by Australian institutions, as well as six prints from the Liber Studiorum series, c.1806-24; twenty-nine engravings from the Turner Gallery, c.1859-78; and items of ephemera from Turner’s studio supplied to artist and Turner authority, Tony Smibert, by Tate Gallery, London. Alongside Turner, over two hundred works by Australian-based artists, many from the Gippsland Art Gallery collection, will be presented comparatively.

The earliest of the corresponding paintings selected by Gregg is Glover’s Dido Building Carthage (after J.M.W. Turner), c.1815. Glover, who knew Turner well, produced “romantic” landscapes in the Italianate style. At the age of sixty-four he moved to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) and became a pastoralist. Adapting his painting style to the new surroundings, Glover is regarded as the “father of Australian landscape painting.” Over 200 years after Glover’s work, Turner’s influence is also detectable in the most recent painting in the show, Peter Gardiner’s Elephant, 2024, winner of the John Leslie Art Prize 2024.

Gregg is intrigued by the longevity of this stylistic link, and the continuity of Turner’s work as a touchstone within the national art vernacular. “For over thirty years I’ve been talking to artists, especially about their influences and what makes them tick. Turner is the name that comes up far more than any other. His enduring hold over the creative imagination of Australian artists is nothing short of a phenomenon,” he asserts. The idea for an exhibition exploring this deep affiliation, the broad parallels between the Romantic art movement in Europe, and what he was seeing in contemporary Australian art, has preoccupied Gregg for at least twenty of those years. “You do start to see his influence everywhere. It makes you think that on some level, whether or not they are aware of it, every single landscape artist in Australia owes something to Turner.”

Turner & Australia marks only the second time the entire 800 square metre gallery space has been devoted to a single exhibition. Realising an ambitious project on this scale formed part of the business case Gregg presented to Wellington Shire Council for a significant building redevelopment that was completed in 2018. “We’re very lucky with our facility—not every regional gallery could do an exhibition like this,” he says. Since its establishment in 1965, the focus of the collection has been Gippsland and the natural environment, with particular strengths in works on paper, landscape, wildlife art, and contemporary painting. For over a decade, Gregg has been assiduously acquiring artworks for Gippsland’s permanent collection that might be suitable for inclusion in the present exhibition.

In Australia, the last thirty years has seen the major exhibitions Turner in 1996 and Turner from the Tate: The Making of a Master in 2013, both at the National Gallery of Australia; other Turner works were included in important surveys in 2008 and 2022. Gregg has taken a thematic approach to this exhibition, the first to consider Turner’s enduring influence in Australian art history. The large introductory space will feature a “salon hang” to convey a sense of magnitude. Mid-century and contemporary Australian art from the likes of Geoffrey Dyer (1947-2020), James Gleeson AO (1915-2008), and Min-Woo Bang explore the major themes of atmosphere, clouds, sky and mountains. “Some of the Turner pieces we’re showing either haven’t been seen before in a designated exhibition, or certainly not in a context like this. The two watercolours from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the one from the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts [Hobart] and the other from Ballarat Art Gallery all come from the 1790s. They will form an evocative grouping, and have never been exhibited together previously,” Gregg remarks.

Three major oils by Turner will be hung in side galleries, with each painting determining the content of the room surrounding it. “The Substance of Landscape” focuses on the pastoral Walton Bridges, c.1806, which depicts the double span bridge that crossed the river Thames at the market town of Walton, and is one of a series of similar views Turner produced after he moved from London in 1804 to a house on the banks of the river near Isleworth. Turner’s nascent career as an architectural draughtsman and topographer is evident in the interplay between the picturesque structural elements and the figural grouping of workers occupied with a sheep-wash and manoeuvring the livestock onto barges.

It was an appropriate and relatable acquisition for the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), given that much of Australia’s wealth came from agrarian industries such as wool production. “This work is important in grounding the exhibition and provides a connection between what came before Turner (Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, Richard Wilson), and where he took landscape art afterwards…he’s not yet tearing the world asunder. That came later,” Gregg observes. “In that sense you could say it’s a transitional work, but it represents a period that was important for Australian artists because it’s the kind of Turner work that most influenced the early émigré artists to Australia…the type of view that characterised the ‘heroic’ years of Australian landscape.”

Turner’s work is described as being “synonymous with the Sublime,” as it was espoused by the philosopher and social theorist Edmund Burke (1729-97) in his treatise of 1757. “The Sublimity of Nature” section of the exhibition will explore this notion of awe and terror, along with oceanic and maritime themes, in works by Sophia Szilagyi, Eugene von Guérard (1811-1901), Michaye Boulter, and two contrasting paintings by Tom Roberts (1856-1931). The centrepiece is Dunstanburgh Castle, 1798, the first painting in oils sold by Turner from the walls of the Royal Academy.

Turner’s later works, the often-vaporous abstract paintings of the 1840s where the pictorial world is suffused with pure colour and his handling of light has altered, were perceived by his colleagues and critics alike as “unfinished” and bewildering. The “unpaintable” became the only real challenge left for an artistic colossus whose restless creativity transformed the landscape and the forces of nature into the means to explore emotional turbulence, within an era of immense socio-political upheaval.

The selection of works for “The Theatre of Light” pivot around the controversial painting Falls of the Schaffhausen (Val d’Aosta), c.1845. Initially believed to depict clouds and mist across a valley in the Piedmont region of the Italian Alps, long a source of inspiration for Turner, in 2000 it was suggested that the subject is Europe’s largest waterfall, located in Switzerland near Schloss Laufen. So thoroughly did Turner command the medium that his capacity for improvisation and transformative visual language could effectively be applied to anywhere; making the confusion over the actual site more understandable.

In 1973, when the NGV was grappling with how to acquire such an expensive work, artist Albert Tucker (1914-99) lent his support, writing, “I feel that this painting is one which shows Turner’s remarkable capacity to transcend the visual, intellectual and artistic conventions of his time. In a sense, this group of paintings of Turner’s was a signal or marker placed in the future by a man of extraordinary prescience.” The hypnotic quality of these later works, exploring the boundaries of colour and pigment in a distinctly modern way, was a perceptual leap into the future that has resonated with subsequent generations of artists and audiences.

Some of the more ephemeral of the Australian content is in direct conversation with Turner’s late works, including those by Lloyd Rees (1895-1988), Aida Tomescu, Owen Piggott (1931-2015), and Todd McMillan. “Probably the most abstract is Mist over Western Port III, 2022, by Warren Nichols, which looks like it’s just flat blue, but when you get in close you can just make out the distinction of water and sky,” Gregg suggests. “He mixes marble dust in his paints and uses the most subtle colours, so it really has to be seen ‘in the flesh.’ Those are the sorts of innovations that speak to Turner’s late works.”

By transcending aesthetic boundaries of spatiality and perspective, thus forging a more metaphysical relationship with the landscape and prevailing atmospheric conditions, Turner foreshadowed both impressionism and abstract expressionism. “It is here in Australia, that Turner’s visions of a world at the very limits of possibility found a particularly potent application,” Gregg believes. “When our artists, confronted by the extremes of the Australian condition, ponder how they might translate what they see before them into a piece of art, it is so often Turner, still to this day, to whom they turn as their guide.”

Exhibition
Turner & Australia
7 June – 24 August 2025
Gippsland Art Gallery, Victoria

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 71, 2025. 
Images courtesy of the artists, Gippsland Art Gallery, Victoria; Western Plains Cultural Centre, Dubbo, New South Wales; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.