A brand new Turner display, Tate Britain

JMW Turner is widely regarded as one of our greatest painters – certainly the greatest before the modern age. As an island nation, we have all the more reason to love him. He chronicles the sea like no other. Teetering on the edge of abstraction, he moves past detail, and works with essence.

This summer, the Tate Britain mount a major new display of the artist's work – including some of his greatest paintings, such as Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps and Peace – Burial at Sea, as well as the artist's 1799 self portrait, which will feature on the Bank of England’s new £20 banknote. Many of the paintings return home following a major world tour of Late Turner – Painting Set Free

Turner’s legacy is a tricky one, partly a victim of its own success. Beloved by painters, Turner has sometimes been co-opted as Britain’s precursor to Modernist abstraction.

His enormous canvases and poetic watercolours might lack the clarity and definition of naturalistic painting, but this is because his art was about representing – worshipping – what he saw. He once strapped himself to the mast of a ship prior to painting a storm at sea, the better to observe it, so the story goes.

The 100 or so paintings in this display include some of the best he ever made. Come and swim in the Romantic spirit of the late 18th and early 19th centuries: the search for the awesome, elemental and sublime.