1. Self-Portrait

Turner famously disliked having his portrait painted, an awkwardness heightened by his awareness that, even as a young man, many of his contemporaries found his features coarse and at odds with the poetic aspirations of his creations. It is remarkable, then, that he made this self-portrait, one of only a handful of specifically figurative works in his output.

2. Fishermen at Sea

Fishermen at Sea was Turner’s first oil painting to be exhibited at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition. He had been showing watercolours there since 1790, and indeed he had ten on display on this occasion.

3. Snow Storm Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps

This is one of the most ambitious and important paintings of the early part of Turner’s career. It marks the first appearance, attached to the catalogue entry, of lines from Turner’s own fragmentary manuscript poem, ‘The Fallacies of Hope’.

4. London from Greenwich Park

Panoramic views of the burgeoning capital became increasingly common in the nineteenth century. Turner rarely chose to engage with the implications of the sprawl of the metropolis but seems to have shared contemporary anxieties regarding London’s encroachment onto the surrounding countryside.

5. The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire

The complete title of Turner’s painting is a daunting fifty-one words long: The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire – Rome being determined on the Overthrow of Her Hated Rival, demanded from her such Terms as might either force her into War, or ruin her by Compliance: the Enervated Carthaginians, in their Anxiety for Peace, consented to give up even their Arms and their Children.

6. Study for 'Bamburgh Castle'

After 1830 Turner ceased exhibiting watercolours at the Royal Academy. But many of his works for the England and Wales, and other later, series made their first appearance in the more informal conversazione conducted by groups of appreciative collectors, sometimes staged by dealers who hoped to secure sales.

7. The Lake, Petworth, Sunset

During 1827 Turner renewed his former close links with Lord Egremont, one of the most important collectors of his early oil paintings. That autumn he was among the guests at Petworth House, the aristocrat’s country home in Sussex, to the south of London.

8. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage - Italy

Published in four cantos between 1812 and 1818, Lord Byron’s poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage describes the travels, experiences and meditations of a self-exiled pilgrim named Harold (‘Childe’ is an archaic title applied to a young noble awaiting knighthood), whose wanderings correspond in many ways to Byron’s own, though the poet denied that he identified with Harold.

9. Traeth Mawr, with Y Cnicht and Moelwyn Mawr

Although Turner subsequently proclaimed the Scottish landscape a more suitable vehicle of the Sublime, his trips to Wales in the 1790s laid the foundations for a continuing fascination with mountainous scenery. This sketch is one of a group of large sheets of paper seemingly worked directly from nature during Turner’s 1799 tour of North Wales.

10. Naples The Castel del’Ovo

One of the sights Turner would have anticipated most keenly on his first trip to Italy was that offered by the celebrated Bay of Naples. Indeed, he was so eager to see it that he set out on the four day journey south from Rome almost immediately after arriving in October 1819.

11. The Medway

This watercolour appears to have been prepared for the Rivers of England series, although it was not in the event included in that publication. Subsequently, Turner produced a modified version of the image as one of a group of experimental mezzotints that he created in the early 1820s, seemingly as a means of understanding the potential for engraving on the newly available steel plates.

12. Norham Castle, Sunrise

This dazzling morning view of Norham Castle is one of ten reworkings of earlier mezzotint images from the Liber Studiorum (in this case plate 57, published 1816). Turner had developed a long fascination with Norham, on the Scottish border, which he had first visited in 1797, nearly fifty years before painting this work.

13. Peace - Burial at Sea

Between 1840 and 1846 Turner exhibited a sequence of nine almost square canvases (see also nos.109-11; three others were prepared but left incomplete: B&J 443, 504, 532). It is clear that those of 1840 and 1841 were presented in frames with a circular opening, but that from 1842 Turner selected slips, inside the main frame, that covered only the corners of each image.

14. Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth

Turner’s title for this disturbing and original late painting added the first of many supplementary layers of mystery to what was already an eccentric puzzle for its initial audience. His opening statement is relatively descriptive of what can actually be seen: a steamboat, potentially in peril, is caught at the centre of a swirling vortex of wind and waves, smoke and snow. The burst of white light behind the mast comes from a flare, sent up to alert others to the ship’s difficulties.

15. Venice The Western End of the Giudecca Canal

Turner painted this work during his third and final visit to Venice, in the late summer of 1840. It is one of a number of beautiful colour studies made in two of the soft-covered sketchbooks he frequently used on his later travels. It is also one of a group of watercolours depicting the wide Giudecca canal, which separates the main part of the city, to the left, from the islands of Giudecca and San Giorgio Maggiore to its south.