Alex Geldzahler, Contributing Photographer

On Saturday, the Yale Center for British Art unveiled a new exhibit dedicated to the work of the Romantic painter Joseph Mallord William Turner. The exhibit, titled J.M.W. Turner: Romance and Reality, brings together 77 works curated from the museum’s own collection. 

Along with “Tracy Emin: I Loved You Until the Morning,” the two exhibits coincide with the reopening of the Yale Center for British Art after its two-year closure for renovations. Encompassing the building’s third-floor galleries, the works allow viewers to circulate throughout the chronological trajectory of Turner’s artistic focus. 

“What I sought to bring out in this show, hence the title as well, ‘Romance and Reality,’ the conflation of all these different ideas about the world coming together,” said Lucinda Lax, the curator of paintings and sculpture at the YCBA. “On the one hand, you’ve got the classic sublime, the monumental … then you’ve also got this kind of engagement with the everyday, the quotidian.” 

The exhibit demonstrates Turner’s close study of architectural and topographical details beginning early in his career. His work explores landscapes in the same European pictorial tradition that he was raised in and exposed to during his travels around the continent. 

Many of the paintings on display are emblematic of Turner’s exploration of various European landscapes, ranging from sleepy British ports to fiery Vesuvian explosions. 

“Turner being Turner, his ambition is to surpass those traditions and move beyond,” said Lax. “You see this profound shift taking place … which is something that he learns so early on in his career. But you know it’s the melding of past and present, it’s all these contrasts.” 

The exhibit brings together multiple different mediums through which Turner explored his visions of the European landscape of industrialization. Beyond his paintings, imbued with his signature tension and emotion, the exhibit features many of his watercolors and his etchings, of which the collection has “over 3,000 prints by or after Turner,” according to Lax. 

“The exhibition offers a remarkable opportunity to experience one of the finest collections of Turner’s works outside the U.K. Showcasing a diverse range of media—including drawings, sketches, paintings, watercolors and prints—it provides a comprehensive perspective on Turner’s career-long engagement with modernity and its contradictions,” wrote Caterina Franciosi GRD ’26 in an email to the News. 

Throughout the exhibit, one can notice Turner’s drift towards abstraction. He explores atmospheric romanticism, coinciding with the rapidly changing landscape and economy of England and Europe during the early 19th century. 

Take, for example, “Staffa: Fingal’s Cave (c. 1832),” which portrays a ship pulling a black cloud of coal and an amber sun on the horizon through almost supernatural, atmospheric effects. 

“The painting exemplifies Turner’s ability to transform personal observation into a profound meditation on humanity’s place within the forces of nature, the cosmos, and the environmental residues of fossil-fueled progress,” wrote Franciosi. 

Beyond exploring Turner’s vivid landscape compositions, his miniature watercolors of various European and English locales also depict actual places and events as well as classical scenes. 

The exhibit’s chronology takes the viewer to the end of Turner’s career, with dreamy, bright paintings that affirm the trends of abstraction, emotion and raw beauty he tended towards throughout his prolific career. 

Beyond these breathtaking paintings, the YCBA has also put Turner’s last sketchbook on display. It contains scenes straight from Turner’s hand before his death. 

The YCBA offers a replica of the book in the store and a collection of postcards replicated from the sketchbook. 

“I really like the exhibit so far because I’m a huge fan of paintings in nature and of scenery. I think that being able to see more nature depicted in art makes me feel closer to the world, to the earth,” said Madison Butchko ’26.

The Yale Center for British Art is located at 1080 Chapel St.

Correction, April 2: A previous version of the article misspelled Caterina Franciosi’s last name.