Completing the Turner Cataloguing Project
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In 2012, updates on the Turner Bequest cataloging project described the effort as a 30-year initiative with a completion date of 2014. A decade later, this short film marks the close of the project’s final phase.
“Completing the Turner Cataloguing Project | What Can Turner’s Sketchbooks Tell Us? New Discoveries,” 11 minutes, produced by Storya, 2025. Featuring Matthew Imms, Hayley Flynn, Hannah Kaspar, and Vanessa Otim.
Marking 250 years since the birth of J.M.W. Turner, this short documentary explores the closing chapter of a decades-long cataloguing project that has transformed how we see one of Britain’s greatest artists. Commissioned by the Paul Mellon Centre in collaboration with Tate, the film captures the final phase of cataloguing Turner’s 37,000 drawings, sketchbooks, and watercolours—the largest holding of preparatory works by a single artist in the world.
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The catalogue is available here»
David Blayney Brown, ed., J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Watercolours (London: Tate Research Publication, 2012).
Landscape and history painter, master draughtsman and watercolourist, tireless traveller, poet and teacher, J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) exemplifies the energy, imagination and enquiring spirit of his time. For his admirer John Ruskin he was “the greatest of the age.” Explore the world’s largest collection of Turner’s sketchbooks, drawings and watercolours and its unique insights into the artist’s mind and creative process. Follow him as he toured Britain and Europe, discovered new subjects, styles and techniques, and developed his pictures, poetry and prints.
J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours is a growing catalogue of the many thousands of original works on paper in Tate’s collection, drawn mainly from Turner’s bequest of his collection to the nation. Divided into five sections covering different phases in Turner’s career, the catalogue consists of thematic groupings of works, arranged chronologically and by subject. Entries on the groupings and individual works provide detailed commentaries, exhibition and publication histories, and information about the media and materials used.
Research Leads
Martha Barratt — Senior Research Editor
Amy Concannon — Manton Senior Curator, Historic British Art
Project Editors
David Blayney Brown — Curator British Art, 1790–1850
Matthew Imms — Senior Cataloguer
Jennifer Mundy — Head of Art Historical Research
The full contributor list is available here»
Research Project | Generation Landscape
Francis Danby, The Avon Gorge, Looking toward Clifton, ca. 1820
(New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
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From the Paul Mellon Centre:
With the completion of the online catalogue of the Turner Bequest at Tate, supported by the PMC and launched with a major international conference, Turner 250 at Tate, this is a watershed moment for the study and understanding of the contribution of English landscape painting within the wider contexts of European and world culture. Generation Landscape will bring art historians, curators, academic researchers, and creative voices together to think afresh about this significant moment in art history, when a generation of emerging artists created paintings and graphic works offering bold and often experimental new visions of nature, the landscape and the purpose of art itself—and why these images continue to carry such imaginative force today.
Sarah Turner, Director of the PMC, said: “Collaborating to support a vibrant infrastructure of research is at the heart of the PMC’s approach. Through our funding, we are really delighted to bring together the convening potential and academic expertise offered by the Courtauld’s new Manton Centre with our partners at museums and galleries in Ipswich, Bristol, and Margate. This partnership is going to build on the foundations of the extraordinary body of scholarship that already exists on artists such as Turner and Constable and will support a new generation of curators, researchers, and artists to engage with it and shape different and original responses for audiences today. “
Steve Edwards, Director of the Manton Centre at The Courtauld, said: “Sir Edwin Manton built an art collection centred around the important generation of English landscape painters: Constable, Gainsborough, Girtin, Turner, and others. This collaboration between the Manton Centre and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art establishes a dialogue with the artists at the heart of his interests to consider the meanings and values that have shaped Britain. Generation Landscape will support and promote new scholarship and curatorial work concerned with landscape and nature, providing an exciting opportunity to place contemporary research in conversation with a moment when both British art and British society were undergoing profound change.”
Generation Landscape is a three-year programme of research and events organised by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Manton Centre at The Courtauld.
With additional information here:
This research project is founded upon the simple fact that a stellar collection of British landscape artists—including J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Thomas Girtin, and John Sell Cotman—were born within just a few years of each other (1775 in the case of the earliest, Girtin and Turner, and 1782 in the case of the latest, Cotman). Generation Landscape is intended to look afresh at the kinds of landscape imagery produced by these individual artists and their contemporaries. It will do so from a variety of art-historical perspectives, including those that are being newly developed in response to our current environmental crisis.
Generation Landscape encompasses and complements detailed new research on a number of the individual practitioners listed above. This activity includes the production of a new online catalogue of Thomas Girtin’s works, written by Dr. Greg Smith, published in 2022. Research undertaken as part of the project fed into the major 2025 Tate Britain exhibition Turner and Constable: Rivals & Originals. More broadly, Generation Landscape aims to chart the trajectories of this distinctive cohort of landscape artists in relation to a shared set of interests, experiences, and circumstances. It will look at how these practitioners and their works interacted with, and differed from, each other, and responded in both comparable and contradictory ways to the challenges—artistic, cultural, political, and environmental—thrown up by their era.
Generation Landscape was initiated in 2021 by Mark Hallett, former Director of the Paul Mellon Centre.
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