A World of Care: Turner and the Environment

JMW Turner, Fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London, 1841, Tate.

This year’s exhibition reveals how Turner captured environmental and social developments that would go on to change Britain and the world‘s climates forever. A World of Care: Turner and the Environment is the first exhibition dedicated to this subject. Highly attuned to changes in the landscape and atmosphere, Turner captured them in his ground-breaking paintings, drawings and engravings. Through his art, he documented plumes of smoke, burning furnaces, urban sprawl, deforested landscapes, overfishing and extreme weather. The exhibition also seeks to connect the changes that Turner was observing and capturing in beautiful works of art, with changes to the environment that we are currently seeing.