Turner show whips up new year storm

As silent as a church, the long narrow room again displays its treasures. The visitors arrive and study them closely. Many of the viewers will be seeing them for the first time. For others, it will be one of many return visits paid over the years.

On Monday, New Year's Day, at the National Gallery of Ireland, the annual exhibition of a collection of watercolours by the great British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner opens and will run for a month.

The viewing is an established winter ritual. Turner was an artist of his time, a committed professional who chronicled his changing world, from the Napoleonic era to the Victorian. Yet his delicate, subtle and vibrant work is also modern and timeless.

Therein lies the revolutionary genius of a famously self-confident, outspoken character, part of whose rich legacy is his exploration of the effect of colour on light. For him, colour was an expression of mood as well as a play of light.

Under the terms of a bequest made to the gallery by English Quaker art connoisseur Henry Vaughan (1808-1899), 31 of Turner's watercolours were given to the gallery on the condition that the works be exhibited only in January, when the light is at its weakest. From 1901, these paintings, along with an additional five which were later acquired by the National Gallery, have been shown.

Turner was an innovator and his influence has endured. It may be traced down through impressionism, of which he could be called the father. To study a Monet is to note the presiding reflection cast by Turner. His presence is also evident in the work of American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko or Irish artist Seán McSweeney.

Turner was born in 1775, the son of a Devon barber and wig maker, who had moved to London a decade before the future artist's birth. He grew up in the Covent Garden area of a city that was already attracting vast numbers of aspiring artists as well as the rural poor. It was the age of the watercolourist.

Turner senior encouraged his son's talent for drawing. In time, Turner received lessons from Thomas Malton the Younger (1748-1804) who had a studio in Covent Garden and whose brother, James Malton, made his Dublin series in 1790.

This year's Turner exhibition looks to the watercolourist tradition and includes the work of 11 other artists, some of whom were near contemporaries of Turner, also engaged in topographical and classical studies. They are represented by works also owned by the National Gallery.

The cutter in Nicholas Pocock's British Men-of-War in a Fresh Breeze (1791) might almost be mistaken as the work of Turner.

William Alexander is represented by Suburbs of a Chinese City (1795) and, although an inferior artist, he is of interest because he travelled to China as part of an official three-year embassy. In common with the 18th century artist Gabriel Beranger, who drew many Irish antiquities which would now be lost but for him, Alexander recorded the inland waterways from Beijing to Canton.

Edward Dayes, who was famous for his topographical views, placed much importance on detail. His undated Southhampton Harbour uses blue, grey and brown washes to build up the surface. Initially, his liking for blue and grey washes influenced Turner, who began using them in the mid-1790s.

William Marlow's The Amphitheatre at Nîmes (c1770) is a good example of the classical genre which many artists of that time favoured, including Turner.

Turner's The West Gate, Canterbury, Kent (c1793) offers a view of the only surviving medieval gate to Canterbury. It is also the earliest Turner work in this collection and shows his commitment to the watercolour genre.

Turner was the father of two daughters by a woman he never married. Despite a number of relationships, he succeeded in avoiding marriage and lived, when not travelling, with his father until he died at the age of 85.

Travel sustained his vision. He undertook 56 tours and filled more than 300 sketch books.

Practicality as well as patriotic passion saw the young Turner travel around England, Scotland and Wales.

But by 1817, continental Europe was at peace and he was free to explore Austria, Germany and Switzerland, Italy and, most memorably, Venice, which he visited three times over a 30-year period.

Between 1797 and 1834, he visited Scotland six times, but only saw Loch Lomond once. Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding's undated Loch Lomond is included in the exhibition at the National Gallery, as is Samuel Austin's A Scottish Lough (1831), a large work which shows Turner's influence.

The inclusion of Louise Rayner's Lincoln from below the Stonebow Gate (1862) is an inspired touch. Born in 1832 and a daughter of the architectural watercolourist Samuel Rayner, her work is an engaging social history.

Turner lived until 1851 and completed more than 500 oil paintings, as well as thousands of watercolours and sketches.

The Vaughan collection in the National Gallery, though small in terms of his vast output, nevertheless captures his range and ability to express the serenity of nature as well as its menace, whether a raging sea or a lightning storm in the Alps.

Enjoy the beauty of Passau at the Confluence of the Rivers Inn and Danube (1840) and see why he remains the finest English painter of all and one of art's supreme masters.

• Turner and the Traditionalists opens on Monday, New Year's Day, and runs throughout January. Admission is free.