Exhibition: A World of Care: Turner and the Environment

This summer, 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. The exhibition, featuring the rarely seen oil painting Sunset, c.1830-35, the original drawing of London from Greenwich 1808-09 and Fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London, 1841, demonstrates Turner’s keen attention to society’s impact on the natural world and the huge effect environmental change had on his subject matter.

Turner’s contemporaries, the poet William Wordsworth and the writer John Ruskin, despaired at the environmental changes they witnessed. While other 19th century landscape painters turned away from the newly industrialised world Turner determined to incorporate modern realities into his art, seeing both disruption and beauty in them. The changes he witnessed fired his imagination and drove him to capture new artistic subjects, such as the 24-hour carbon-economy in Shields on the River Tyne, and the record-breaking momentum of the steam engine in Rain, Steam and Speed.

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.