National Gallery: JMW Turner’s watercolour exhibition leaves a powerful impression

The initial reason for the show being held in winter was that it was feared that the strong natural light later in the year would cause the delicately coloured ­pictures to fade. More than a century on, this superb collection more than justifies its perennial position as the gallery’s opening gambit of the New Year.

The 38 pictures of the bequest reflect Turner’s passion for travel, both around Britain and in continental Europe, and his fascination with the natural world, and with humanity’s interventions in it. The show encompasses work from Caernarvon in Wales to a painting of the Falls of Clyde (the fruit of the artist’s tour of Scotland in 1801), and from the German Rhineland to the splendours of Venice.

Representational the pictures may be, but they provide copious examples of a quasi-abstract aspect in Turner’s work that marks him out as an inspirational forebear of the great impressionist movement that emerged, with such famous painters as Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne, later in the 19th century. Indeed, such is Turner’s desire to express the awe-inspiring scale and power of ­nature that we can see its re-emergence in the paintings of a celebrated painter of the 20th and 21st centuries such as ­Gerhard Richter.

One might even go so far as to describe Turner as the first modernist painter. For sure, one could make a very strong case for his picture Hiedelberg (created around 1846) as a harbinger of the impressionism and abstraction that would come to the fore in European painting in the decades to come.

Executed in watercolour and gouache, with parts of the picture scraped out by the artist, the piece straddles the ­classical representational tradition (which ­Turner’s early critics demanded he return to) and an elemental, even ­spiritual ­impressionism that had not been achieved by any other painter of Turner’s time.

We can make out the Old Bridge over the River Neckar as it appears through the otherwise all-enveloping haze of the painting. The river itself, the city beyond, even the people beside and on (or in) the water are consumed by a fog of reds, browns and yellows.

The white heat of the sun sears through the clouds sending the blues of the sky into shades of retreat. Two banks of ­faceless human figures appear like a mirage, almost as if those on the right are denizens of the underworld beckoning the new dead into the River Styx.

As a work of nominally representational, early-19th century art, the painting is absolutely extraordinary. Indeed, the sheer force with which Turner expresses the emotional and psychological implications of the scene surpasses most of the work of the impressionists who would succeed him.

Heidelberg is, arguably, the finest work on display in the exhibition. There are, however, many other fascinating and compelling pieces here.

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In creating Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen (painted around five years ­before Heidelberg, in 1841), Turner ­employed a complex array of techniques – ­including scraping and rubbing – to convey the energetic foam generated by the ­rapidly moving water. The effect, as with ­Heidelberg, is one of tremendous sensory, almost symbolic evocation.

If the artist’s travels in Germany gave rise to exceptional watercolours, his ­touring of Italy was no less fruitful. His picture of the Brenva Glacier in the Mont Blanc mountain range, painted from within the Aosta Valley in Italy around 1836, reflects an almost religious sense of awe at the majestic beauty of nature.

The great, late art critic John Berger suggested that the burgeoning irreligiosity of early-19th century England might have played a part in attracting Turner to natural subjects. Certainly, in these paintings, there is no sense of God, either as creator or interlocutor between the ­human spirit and nature.

Instead there is just nature and the astonished, almost overwhelmed human being. There is in such artworks a very modern, premonitory ecologism, and one that is rendered all the more powerful by its improbably powerful shimmering through the delicacy of watercolour.

The emergence of beauty at the intersection of nature and human architecture is a recurring theme in Turner’s remarkable paintings of Venice. In The Grand Canal by the Salute (painted in 1840) the great Baroque edifice of the Santa Maria della Salute forces itself into our gaze through a dreamlike haze.

In doing so, it eclipses the almost Bible black canal, the splendid, sun-touched blue sky, and the whites and browns of the city’s buildings. Intriguingly, the barely-defined gondola in the picture is darker than the canal itself, thereby taking on a bleak, funereal character.

By contrast with these mature works, Turner’s early picture of The Falls of Clyde (1801) is a work of promise, rather than greatness. Executed in watercolour over pencil drawing, and on paper, it offers a rewarding insight into the efforts of the painter (then in his mid-20s) to capture the sense of a fast flowing, frothing waterfall.

Painted in light greens, subdued browns and understated greys, the picture shares an almost monochrome aesthetic with other early works in the collection (such as Lake Albano and The Medway, both created between 1794 and 1797). Elsewhere the collection reflects the artist’s fascination with rapidly developing maritime technologies, not least in the building of military ships.

Turner’s painting of Durham (from around 1835) underlines the supremacy, for the painter, of artistic interpretation over realistic representation. Although the painting depicts the city from an established vantage point, the artist has turned the famous cathedral 45 degrees, thereby showing the iconic building to its best aesthetic advantage.

Turner was, unarguably, one of the most important and influential European painters of the 19th century. This fact is reflected brilliantly in this exhibition of the pictures in the Vaughan bequest.

Until January 31: nationalgalleries.org