This year's exhibition brings Margate to Turner's House in St. Margarets
Turner's House opened to the public in 2017 after it had been restored to its original design.
LONDON.—
This year's exhibition at Turner's House in St. Margarets, near Richmond, London, “Unfinished Business: The Mystery of Margate and Turner’s Bequest” gives visitors the opportunity to see an extraordinary sea painting by one of Britain's greatest maritime artists, displayed within the house he designed and had built in Twickenham by 1813. Sandycombe Lodge, as he called it, was his country retreat from the rigors of the London art world. On loan from the National Gallery, London, Margate (?), from the Sea, one of his later works from circa 1835-1840, is the focus of an exhibition that uncovers the complex and fascinating story of the Turner Bequest, and reveal how attitudes to Turner's work changed across the centuries.
Curated by Alan Crookham, the National Gallery's Chief Librarian and Archivist, the exhibition is the first partnership with the organisation and Turner's House Trust. The exhibition opened on Turner's birthday on 23rd April 2026 and will run until 26th October.
Alan comments that "Turner's atmospheric seascape, Margate, is enigmatic both in terms of its subject matter and the history of its reception. This exhibition gives visitors to Turner's House the opportunity to consider their own response to the painting itself, and to its place within the canon of Turner's works."
Turner's House opened to the public in 2017 after it had been restored to its original design. Turner had built this small villa in 1813 to escape from London to what was then considered countryside. He found inspiration in his good friend Sir John Soane's house Pitzhanger Manor in nearby Ealing, and included elements at a smaller scale when he designed his house. Turner's father spent most of his time there after his retirement, and particularly looked after the garden and helped entertain his son's numerous guests. Turner famously invited fellow Royal Academicians to the Pic-Nic-Academical Club at his house (held on the first Wednesday of each month from January to July).
Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775 - 19 December 1851) was born in Covent Garden, but spent part of his youth near St. Margarets and Twickenham while living with his uncle. It was here he learned to appreciate the local landscape and the River Thames to the west of London. He studied at the Royal Academy from 1789 and was elected a full Royal Academician when he was only 27 years old in 1802. Turner sold the house 200 years ago, when he found himself spending more time abroad, but also increasingly in Margate, Kent.
As an eleven-year-old, Turner had been sent to school in Margate and he returned there 10 years later to sketch. From the 1820s he escaped to the seaside town on a more regular basis, and particularly after 1833 when he began a relationship with the twice-widowed Sophia Booth. Mrs Booth owned a boarding house by the harbour and from here Turner loved to observe and paint the coastline. Even when they both spent a lot of time in Chelsea he would return to her house by the harbour in Margate travelling by boat from London. The work on loan is a fine example of the artist's lifelong preoccupation with the sea, the changing character of the sky and weather, and his love for this part of the country.
The painting was left to the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, a complicated and muddled bequest resulting from various iterations of Turner's will across the decades. The artist had chosen to bequeath a large number of his paintings to the National Gallery, including Dido building Carthage and Sun Rising through Vapour in his will. These two paintings came with the condition that they should be displayed alongside Claude’s Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca and Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba. However, after some of Turner’s cousins contested his will, a tortuous lawsuit followed. The settlement that was eventually reached, resulted in a much larger gift of works of art to the nation. Nearly 300 oil paintings and over 30,000 sketches and watercolours, including 300 sketchbooks, which Turner had stockpiled in his house in Marylebone, comprised the largest ever donation of works of art to the nation (most of which are now housed at the Tate Britain). The exhibition includes a copy of Turner's will as well as fascinating original documents and letters selected from the National Gallery archive that provide rich context about the story of this outstanding bequest to the nation.
The Turner Bequest included a large group of paintings that Turner had never exhibited and were deemed unfinished. This included Margate (?), from the Sea. Those paintings were judged during the 19th century as unfit for display. Along with many other works of a similar nature, it was left uncatalogued, without a title and remained hidden away for over 50 years. It wasn't until 1905 that the picture was reassessed and accessioned into the national collection. A.J. Finberg provided the name, when inventorying the Turner Bequest and Martin Davies, later Director of the National Gallery (1968-73), added the question mark, calling the identification of the subject matter into question.
In 1906, the picture, along with other paintings languishing in storage, was at last displayed to the public in a ground-breaking exhibition of Turner’s ‘unknown’ work. The show caused a sensation and was a turning point in the artist's reputation. In the light of the recent artistic developments, particularly Impressionism, the atmospheric depiction of mist and cloud in Margate was no longer dismissed as a lack of finish, but seen as Turner’s pre-emptive ‘modernity’, anticipating the work of painters such as Claude Monet.
In 1968 the National Gallery and Tate (which had formally separated in 1955) agreed that the representation of the British School in each gallery should be more clearly defined. In accordance with the specific clause in Turner’s will (mentioned above), the National Gallery selected a further seven paintings believed to have the necessary merit and significance to represent Turner within the context of European painting. Margate(?), from the Sea was displayed at the Louvre, Paris, during the 1950s, and was a highlight of "Turner: Imagination and Reality", the groundbreaking 1966 exhibition at MoMA in New York that positioned Turner as a precursor of Abstract Expressionism. This is the first time, however, that the painting has been the focus of an exhibition, and this is the first exhibition to showcase the complex legal issues of the Turner Bequest.
The exhibition also includes some pictures showing how artists learned from Turner - two works by Henry Tidmarsh and one by Bertha Mary Garnett. The National Gallery permitted copying of its pictures, and the Turner galleries were particularly popular with copyists, often women who had limited opportunities for formal art education. Garnett's painting depicts one of the Turner galleries in 1887, which was hung densely with finished paintings, some of which can be identified. A copy of The Fighting Temeraire sits on a copyist’s easel.
Dr Gillian Forrester, Independent Art Historian, Curator, Writer and Trustee of Turner’s House, says about the exhibition: "Unfinished Business will tell the compelling story of Turner's bequest to the nation, and invite visitors to speculate on the status of Margate (?), from the Sea. Finished or unfinished? What do these terms mean in the context of Turner's paintings, and how do we decide?"
