This opening section shows how Turner’s conventional training as an architectural draughtsman and at the Royal Academy’s drawing schools from 1789 laid the foundations of his enormous ambition. It was here that he learnt his craft, and the all-important lesson that artists were meant to aspire to greatness by copying, then trying to rival, those who had come before.

Turner’s growing ambitions are apparent in the pictures he created in the later 1790s and in the first decade of the nineteenth century. He wanted to emulate the elevated poetry of classical landscape painting and the powerful naturalism of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters. These pictures show, too, that he had absorbed the lessons of the most adventurous recent art.