The Editors of Romanticism.xyz. Last reviewed: 13 June 2026.

Turner’s Storms: The Sublime, the Sea, and the Sky in the Work of J.M.W. Turner

J.M.W. Turner’s obsession with storms, with the overwhelming power of the natural elements, and with the great visual drama of sea and sky, was one of the central preoccupations of his long career. From his early topographical watercolors to the great late works in which his style moved toward near-abstraction, Turner’s storms are some of the most powerful and most discussed images in the history of Western art. The storm paintings helped establish the Romantic sublime as a major theme in English landscape painting, and they remain a touchstone for our understanding of the Romantic movement.

This page offers a detailed exploration of Turner’s storm paintings — their development, their major works, their meaning, and their long influence.

Turner and the Romantic Sublime

Turner (1775–1851) was the great English Romantic painter of the sublime. The sublime, in the aesthetic theory of Burke and Kant, was the experience of awe, terror, and exaltation that arises in the presence of vast, overwhelming, or terrifying objects — Alpine peaks, Atlantic storms, vast deserts, the open ocean. Turner’s art was dedicated, throughout his long career, to giving visual form to this experience.

The early watercolors and topographical paintings show the young Turner mastering the conventions of the picturesque; the middle-period paintings — the great Alpine passes, the Italian views, the Dutch harbors — show him developing a more personal and more powerful style; the late works — the great storm paintings, the Venetian views, the atmospheric abstractions — show him pushing his art to the limits of what painting could do.

The Major Storm Paintings

Some of Turner’s most important storm paintings include:

Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812) — a great historical landscape in which the Carthaginian army is shown struggling through an Alpine blizzard, a powerful visualization of the human confrontation with the overwhelming forces of nature.
The Shipwreck (1805) — an early major storm painting, showing a small ship in distress off a rocky coast, with the survivors struggling in the waves.
Snow Storm — Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842) — a great late painting in which a steam-boat is shown in the midst of a violent snowstorm, its lights barely visible through the swirling snow. The painting was famously described by Turner as a study of the storm, “where the steam-boat is shown in a position so emblematical of that power, that the disposition of the forms of the mist and driving snow convey fully the idea of those forms.”
Peace — Burial at Sea (1842) — Turner’s tribute to the death of his friend and patron, Sir David Wilkie, in which the burial at sea is shown against a setting sun and a vast, atmospheric sky.
The Fighting Téméraire (1839) — a late painting of an old warship being towed by a steam tug to be broken up, with the setting sun turning the sky to a great field of color.
Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway (1844) — a great late painting of a modern train crossing a railway bridge in a rainstorm, with the great atmospheric effects and the suggestion of the new speed of modern life.
The Slave Ship (1840) — a late painting of a slave ship at sea, with the great storm, the violent sunset, and the suggestion of the human horror at the heart of the scene.

The Style of the Late Works

The late works of Turner pushed the resources of painting to their limits. In the great storm paintings of the 1830s and 1840s, Turner dissolved the line between the sea and the sky, the figure and the atmosphere, the solid and the liquid, the visible and the invisible. The result was a kind of proto-abstract painting that anticipated, by half a century or more, the work of the Impressionists and the early abstractionists.

The great English art critic John Ruskin, who was a powerful champion of Turner, wrote in Modern Painters (1843–60) that the late works of Turner were “the only existing exponents of the truth of infinity” — a claim that has continued to be discussed and debated in the centuries since.

The Influence of Turner’s Storms

Turner’s storm paintings had a profound influence on later Western art. The French Impressionists, especially Monet, were deeply indebted to Turner’s atmospheric and coloristic innovations. The American Luminists, the American Abstract Expressionists (especially the great color-field painters like Mark Rothko), and the contemporary tradition of atmospheric landscape painting all draw, in different ways, on the Turner inheritance. The contemporary cinema — from the atmospheric films of Terrence Malick to the visual epics of Peter Jackson — has also drawn on the Turner tradition.

How to See the Turners

The major collections of Turner’s work include:

The Tate Britain in London — the world’s largest collection of Turner’s work, including the Snow Storm — Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, The Fighting Téméraire, Peace — Burial at Sea, and many others.
The National Gallery in London — important Turner paintings, including The Fighting Téméraire.
The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven — an important collection of Turners, including watercolors and oil paintings.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and many other major museums around the world have important Turner works.