Online Lectures – Unfinished Business: The Mystery of Margate and Turner’s Bequest

About this event

This lecture series will give the opportunity to dive deeper into the story of Turner's bequest, his legacy today, and the relation with Margate.

This lecture series will give the opportunity to dive deeper into the story of Turner’s bequest, his legacy today, and the relation with Margate.

All lectures will be online and recorded. The recording will be shared with ticket holders for a limited time period.

14th May– Contest and controversy: the distribution of Turner’s bequest to the nation – Alan Crookham, Curator of Unfinished Business: The Mystery of Margate and Turner’s Bequest
6.30 – 7.30pm
The lecture will consider the history of the Turner Bequest at the National Gallery in London. It will start by looking at Turner’s will, how it was contested by his relatives before the Court of Chancery, and the resolution of the court case. The talk will then turn to the history of the display of the Turners at Trafalgar Square and the complicated relationship between the National and Tate Galleries as they sought to determine the final, and at times controversial, distribution of the bequest.

11th June – Encounters at MoMA: Turner, Rothko and the Invention of a ‘Modernist’ – Nicole Cochrane
6.30-7.30pm
In March 1966, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened Turner: Imagination and Reality a groundbreaking exhibition featuring an unprecedented number of works by J. M. W. Turner from Tate, alongside major US loans. Conceived by art historian Lawrence Gowing, it was the first MoMA exhibition to showcase a historic artist. The display positioned Turner not as a figure of the past but as a forerunner of modernism – an idea memorably echoed when Mark Rothko, viewing the show with Tate Director Norman Reid, remarked, “That man Turner, he learnt a lot from me.”
This lecture will explore how the 1966 exhibition reshaped public and scholarly understanding of Turner, particularly his late unfinished works, and considers why he has since been framed as a precursor to modernism. It also highlights how these narratives continue to influence contemporary museum displays at Tate and beyond.

13th August – Turner and Margate – Franny Moyle
6.30-7.30pm

In a beautifully illustrated talk, Turner biographer and art historian Franny Moyle will explore J M W Turner’s life-long relationship with the seaside town of Margate. From his earliest known childhood drawings, to his late works, Margate provided a constant source of inspiration for the artist. It was also a place associated with love: first a failed engagement in his youth, and then the fulfilling relationship with Sophia Booth, who was with Turner in the last years of his life.

08th October – Turners for Scotland: Edinburgh’s Vaughan Bequest – Charlotte Topsfield
6.30-7.30pm

In 1900 the art collector Henry Vaughan bequeathed 38 watercolours by JMW Turner to the National Galleries of Scotland, with the stipulation that his watercolours could only be exhibited ‘all at one time free of charge and in the month of January and no longer in every year’. Vaughan’s decision to limit the display of his Turners has ensured that they remain in fine condition, while the annual January exhibition of the Vaughan Bequest has become an Edinburgh institution. Ranging from Wales and Scotland to Venice and the Swiss Alps, from experimental colour studies to literary vignettes, the Vaughan Turners span the artist’s long career and show the diversity of his creative work on paper. Charlotte Topsfield, Senior Curator of British Drawings and Prints at the National Galleries of Scotland, will discuss the watercolours and the history of Edinburgh’s Vaughan Bequest.