One of history’s greatest landscape artists, Joseph Mallord William Turner, is being acknowledged in a new exhibition at Blenheim Palace.

Frequently painting scenes of Oxfordshire, including the palace in 1833, he made numerous drawings and paintings of the university city even as a boy, documenting the streets, colleges and surrounding views outside the city centre.

The artist knew Oxford extremely well and some of the artist’s first commissions and most celebrated works focus on our city’s skyline, helping him to dominate British landscape painting in the first half of the nineteenth century.

All of which will be on show in The Young Turner: Ambitions in Architecture and the Art of Perspective Exhibition at Blenheim Palace

Among the loans from the Ashmolean, Tate and other private collections are Turner’s first sketchbook and diagrams from his Royal Academy lectures in perspective, which have rarely been exhibited before.

A tour exploring the exhibition has also been organised by the Ashmolean Museum, which has a strong affinity with the artist, especially hrough one of ‘young Turner’s most significant townscapes,’ High Street, Oxford (1810).

One of his most fully documented paintings and earliest commissions, this piece was originally intended as a watercolour to be engraved and sold by James Wyatt, who intended to sell it in his shop.

The resulting oil painting was eventually exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1812, and resides at the Ashmolean after a recent campaign to buy it for the nation.

Turner began his career early on in his life, being accepted into the Royal Academy Schools and beginning his formal training at just 14 years old.

His use of light and indistinguishable objects is even said to have influenced the Impressionists in France.

After his death it is believed Turner left approximately 550 canvases, many of which many were gifted to the British people.

His name lives on in other ways: his wish to establish a prize for young artists to encourage a wider interest in contemporary art from the British public has resulted in The Turner Prize which is still being awarded to this day.

The exhibition takes place in the Gallery, Stables Courtyard, Blenheim Palace from this week until April 22.

blenheimpalace.com