Parisians on holiday, the bustling quaysides of Channel ports, light dancing across the surface of the great facade of Rouen Cathedral. Such subjects are now more usually associated with the Impressionist painters of the late nineteenth century. However, forty years earlier JMW Turner had included exactly these ingredients in the two sets of views of the Seine that had defined this river's appearance for his generation.

This exhibition, supported by Glaxo Wellcome, is the first complete assessment of the works by Turner that resulted from his frequent travels to Paris and along the Seine, most particularly in the 1820s. It brings together the complete set of forty gouache and watercolour views that were originally published as line engravings in two instalments in 1834 and 1835, as well as around fifty vibrantly coloured studies associated with the project.

Venice: The Arsenal
(1775 - 1851)

Whether at Le Havre, Rouen, or Paris, or at any of the places in between, Turner's approach is distinctively his own. Often he was prepared to sacrifice the plodding details of topographical accuracy to an expressive representation of sunrise, moonlight or storm. His inventive compositions juggle and compress familiar elements of frequently painted views, forcing us to see them afresh. Repeatedly in this series Turner embraced the visual possibilities of new technology, such as the steamboats plying the river, and from this seed he was to develop his celebrated and elegiac image of the last moments of the Fighting Temeraire.

Visitors to the exhibition will also have the rare chance to see Turner's dramatic view of a destructive tidal wave in The Mouth of the Seine i833, from the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. This was thought to be Turner's only oil painting of a Seine subject, but new research has re-identified several supposedly Italian pictures as views of Normandy and the Seine.

To place Turner's Seine work in its proper context, a number of views by his contemporaries will also be displayed, including work by John Sell Cotman, Thomas Girtin, Frederick Nash and the talented amateur Captain Batty. The main series of Seine views by Turner will also be augmented by examples of the little-known designs he made to illustrate Sir Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon, many of which have not previously been exhibited.