Annual Edinburgh Turner exhibit brings winter cheer

EDINBURGH (Reuters Life!) - A vibrant display of watercolours by the British romantic landscape artist Joseph Turner opens in Edinburgh's National Gallery on January 1 in an annual exhibition reaching back more than 100 years.

Wealthy Victorian art collector Henry Vaughan left a carefully chosen selection of Turner's watercolours to the Scottish gallery -- and another selection to Dublin -- on his death in 1899, stipulating they should only be displayed publicly for a month every January to protect the delicate works from damage.

Vaughan's bequest to Scotland of 38 works came to Edinburgh in 1900 and the annual exhibition has built up a virtual cult following over the years.

"What we have here is a very good representative group that allows you to tell the story of much of Turner's career in a small compass," curator Christopher Baker told Reuters.

"Looking at 20 or 30 watercolours you get all the great stages in his life, from his early tentative works produced in London in the 1790s to the great works of his maturity from the 1840s as well. So it's a perfect introduction to Turner."

The Vaughan bequest to Scotland ranges from Turner's early topographical wash drawings to the colorful and atmospheric watercolor studies he made across Europe in the 1830s and 1840s.

The son of a barber in Covent Garden London, Turner was born in 1775 and produced his first signed and dated watercolours only 12 years later. He first exhibited a watercolor at the Royal Academy in London in 1790, and his first oil painting was shown there five years later.

He died in 1851, and has been described as "perhaps the most prolific and innovative of all British artists".

The Tate Gallery in London holds the bulk of the work he bequeathed to the British nation.

"He's very prolific, he's very varied, he's technically remarkably accomplished, and so lots of different people come to him and get different things from him. Everybody has his or her own Turner, in a way," Baker said.

"We get thousands of people who have come to see the paintings again each year. It's a perfect way of cheering you up at the beginning of the year -- the dark days of an Edinburgh winter."

(Editing by Paul Casciato)