'Empire of Sleep' (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris until March 1 2026): The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

Carolus-Duran, Sleeping Man, 1861, Palais des Beaux Arts de Lille, France

It is a big call to say in January that you have seen one of your exhibitions of the year, but the Musee Marmottan's Empire of Sleep is the stuff that dreams are made of. I have rarely seen such a beautifully hung, thoughtfully curated show. The mood is set with a first small rotunda, hung with heavy drapes of a deep midnight blue on which hang five depictions of sleep, from a Renaissance St Peter to Monet's baby son. The thematic, eclectic approach is continued throughout, for although the focus is 19th century there are Medieval woodcarvings, Picasso prints and a whole lot more besides. The wall texts and labelling (helpfully dual language) are full of information without sacrificing clarity - the section on Religion for instance lists Biblical associations from the Drunkenness of Noah to the idea of Christ being not dead but sleeping. 

The exhibition unfolds in eight sections, including Biblical, classical, erotic, dreams and death. The rich blue walls give way to an equally rich red to sweep you through the developing mood, but this is not just about crowd-pleasing paintings. There is a a serious curatorial line about shifting interpretations of sleep and dreams through the course of the nineteenth century: the exhibition is co-curated by a neurologist, Laura Bossi, and scholarship is at its heart. Effort has also gone into the loans, from literally all over - Grenoble, Montreal, Prague, Skagens, even an Evelyn De Morgan from Cannon Hall near Barnsley - and the effect is a journey of discovery. I was not familiar with Gaetano Previati's work: his Opium Smokers treads an uneasy line between glamour and seediness all painted with a hashish-brown sludge that makes you feel like you may have imbibed yourself. Or Fernand Pelez's Violet Seller, a ruthlessly unsentimental portrayal of a child dying in a doorway which gut-punches with emotion. Or Jules Bastien Lepage's Young Woman Sleeping, a soft focus interior from an artist known for his countryside realism. These discoveries are strung together like pearls by the hang and the curation - individually beautiful but so much more in combination.

One might think that sleep is a narrow theme - a hundred and thirty works of people with their eyes closed - but variety comes from the range of media and the depth of exploration. Goya's famous engraving The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is borne out by Fuseli's disturbing eroticism, Maximilián Pirner's La Somnambule perched precariously on a window ledge and Kiki Smith's spidery drawing from 2001. Sculpture comes in the form of Rodin's fragmentary sleeping figure and a Medieval ivory, apostles crammed together in mutual support. The curators are not afraid to venture into high camp, with John Faed's The Dream of the Poet, a John Martin-esque extravaganza of Highland landscape and spectral figures. And there is room for humour too, from David Hockney's dog and John Everett Millais' sleeping sermon goer, kept just the right side of cutesy by his rich palette of reds and purples.

John Everett Millais, My Second Sermon, 1864, Guildhall Art Gallery, London 

If there is a negative, it is the final bedroom section, which, like a rude awakening, takes you into a brighter lit, more functional space. It almost feels as if the show has accidently spilled over with works crammed awkwardly between stairwell and lift shaft. The Lepage is hung in a corner, next to a similarly stunning Sorolla Mother and Child, two dark heads marooned in a sea of white, distance only serving to emphasise closeness. However, this anticlimax is only really evidence of the woozy pleasure that the previous sections fostered, rather like the comfort of a warm bed and a good night's sleep, this is was an exhibition that I simply didn't want to end. 

Wright of Derby: From the Shadows (National Gallery until May 10 2026)

Joseph Wight of Derby, A Philosopher Lecturing on an Orrery, 1776, Derby Museum and Art Gallery

Joseph Wright seems hampered by his soubriquet 'of Derby', which underlines his apparent provincialism and suggests an almost fairground freakery - a painter! from Derby! well, I never! The town is of course justifiably proud of their son and I would urge anyone who likes his work to go and visit the art gallery there (which will be hosting this exhibition later this summer). Over the years there have been attempts to redress this narrative with studies of the Midlands Enlightenment and the importance of early industrialist patronage. The reality, however, is that Wright trained, travelled and lived for periods elsewhere - Liverpool, Bath, London, Italy - whilst still always calling Derby home. Somewhere along the way he discovered the previous century's love of candlelit paintings and he was hooked. 

This is the starting point for the National Gallery's little one room exhibition. Based as it is around one of their most popular paintings The Experiment on a Bird with an Air Pump, it seems a bit much to sub-title it 'from the shadows'. It is a show which does little to elucidate Wright's inspiration and motives, and its particularly narrow focus on candlelight means the exclusion of other light-based works (the moon, volcanoes). But, boy, are there some wonderful paintings.

Wright's investigation of light is often presented as an anomaly - and, of course it is in terms of both the eighteenth century and of British art. The reality, rather skimmed over here, is that seventeenth century Europe had lapped up dramatic light and shade paintings. Caravaggio is the much quoted instigator, but it was Dutch artists like Gerrit van Honthorst and Hendrick Terbrugghen who really took the idea and ran with it, and to whom Wright seems most obviously indebted. Coincidentally, across the Channel, a sell out show at the musée Jacquemart-André in Paris bringing Georges de la Tour 'from the shadows' (or specifically 'from shadows to light') as well. 

The Dutch artists favoured tavern scenes, musicians, humour or moralising genre: Wright's Two Boys Fighting Over a Pigs Bladder has that Low Countries feel, virtuosic but absurd with its comedic red faces and a tight composition which suggests we are the ones who will have to break up the tussle. Equally, however, there was a strand of religious art, exemplified by la Tour, which exploited the same tenebrist qualities - in terms of mood, Wright often follows this. Indeed, he seems to have two distinct styles, employed as subject demanded: a soft edged emotionalism which seems to evolve directly from the beautifully handled monochrome pastel  self portrait on show; and a crisp, sometimes harsh observational edge.

The exhibition splits into what might be called an Enlightenment section and a genre or 'fancy' section. Two beautiful paintings of classical sculpture establish Wright as an educated, intellectual artist, among fellow intellectuals. Academy by Lamplight allows him to explore a mixed group of observers - something he will go on to do so effectively in his two most famous works, Air Pump and Philosopher Giving a Lecture on an Orrery - but the real subject is art itself, personified by luminously pristine marble. The two big canvases are cleverly hung alongside the real instruments at their centre, the orrery casting arc-ing shadows which Wright himself would have loved. They are extraordinary paintings, complex, subtle, ambiguous, which can be read as paeans to science, proto-Romantic explorations of the sublime, or Frith-like social commentaries, full of exchanged glances and gossipy subplots. They feel like they should be the grand finale of the show rather than the opening act as they are here.

The subsequent, smaller works and accompanying prints are inevitably a little anticlimactic. The Alchemist, for all its apparently similar subject matter has an element of, surely not unintentional, humour in its presentation of the elderly, heavily-bearded and portly scientist, and the detailed recreation of his instruments and feels like a homage to much earlier Northern Renaissance art. The classical ruin setting of the Blacksmith's Shop channels myth as much as it does contemporary life. Disappointingly, The Iron Forge, an obvious companion painting, is not included and the absence of Wright's industrial works (Arkwright's Cotton Mills by Night, for instance) seems a weakness. 

Joseph Wright of Derby, Earth Stopper on the Banks of the River Derwent, 1773, 

Derby Museum and Art Gallery

Stuck round a corner, as the last painting, Earth Stopper on the Banks of the Derwent is even more bereft: Wright was an enthusiastic landscapist and a painter of nature at night with a particular interest in juxtaposing the coolness of the moon with hot man-made light. The Earth Stopper has more in common with these than with the interior candle-lit scenes which dominate the show. Besides the consummate control of the big canvases, these works also have an unevenness, whether this figure's unconvincing weight on the spade, or the oddly out of kilter perspective in Hermit Philosopher by Lamplight. The narrow focus and small number of works mean than these issues are amplified.

Wright is a bigger artist than this display implies. His portraiture and landscapes are often unjustly neglected and if the National Gallery really wanted to bring him 'from the shadows' it could have produced a more interesting exhibition in which the famous candlelight scenes provided a springboard for a wider exploration of Wright's career. This, along with the lack of any real tenebrist context, feels like a missed opportunity. The show is travelling to Derby where it will be enveloped by their permanent collection of Joseph Wright's works - I can't help thinking that will prove to be a better place to see it.

'John Singer Sargent An American in Worcestershire' (Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum until June 14 2026)

John Singer Sargent, Simplon - Mrs Barnard and her Daughter Dorothy, 1905-15, 

Birmingham Museums

Late nineteenth century Europe was awash with artists' colonies (Skagens, Newlyn, Pont Aven) but Broadway, a sleepy village at the very southern tip of Worcestershire, is not one that springs immediately to mind. Still less do you associate it with a community of ex-pat Americans, whose names you might link more readily to France or Italy. It was news to me that John Singer Sargent rocked up there, convalescing from having hit his head diving off a weir, and liked it so much he returned for several summers. It was news too that a group of artists and writers which included Henry James, Edmund Gosse, Alfred Parsons and Edwin Austin Abbey joined him. This all makes Worcester City Art Gallery's new exhibition, An American in Worcestershire, intrinsically interesting, and  the show is impressive in the number of loans and its ambition to tell this little known, locally significant story. Ultimately it is not big or comprehensive enough but the Worcester curators always make an effort and for that alone they should be applauded.

The exhibition hangs round the work of John Singer Sargent, and although most of it here is tenuously connected with Broadway, it is nonetheless worth seeing in its own right. The first room boasts some fine Sargent portraits, particularly two charcoal sketches of the Earl and Countess of Rocksavage on loan from a private collection and a small but dashing oil of Flora Priestley, spikily bright in black, from the Ashmolean. Even in a small selection Sargent's apparently effortless ability to balance flattery and characterisation is evident. Perhaps the most striking work, however, is a First World War image of American Troops Going up the Line, a khaki-grimed prequel to Gassed, as men gather by the railway tracks which will take them to the industrial slaughter of the Front Line. It is small and shocking after the jokey letters, cartoons and world of sunshine, tennis and country japes which the show has previously conjured up.

Sargent's most famous Worcester work, however, perhaps inevitably has not been secured for the exhibition: Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose remains in Tate Britain (although the gallery has been generous with other works). The iconic image of the Barnard sisters was painted at Broadway over a number of weeks in 1885, with Sargent working only briefly outside each day, when the evening light was exactly right. The narrative of the production is well told, but the curators have to rely of reproductions not just of the final painting but of preliminary sketches, now in the United States. The result feels a little hollow. There are, however, some beautiful watercolours of the sisters and their mother, which have all the fluidity of Sargent's later landscapes with the sky-less intimacy and the soft, pinkish peaches which he increasingly favoured. They are fresh and oozing with life. 

Francis Davis Millet, Between Two Fires, c.1892, Tate

Colony camaraderie is the second strand of the exhibition, related through solid wall texts, contemporary letters and blown-up reproductions of some of Sargent's own scribbled cartoons. Broadway developed haphazardly, perhaps suggested to Alfred Parsons as a bolt hole by William Morris (here relegated to a supporting role outside the main show). Francis Davis Millet's purchase of the ramshackle old manor, Abbot's Grange, provided a 'bolt-hole' and the ex-pat community were the regular visitors - Henry James, Edwin Austin Abbey, Sargent himself. They were augmented by Brits like Edmund Gosse, Parsons and George Boughton (born in Norwich but brought up in the States)and the Alma Tademas (who don't get a look in here). There is a great story here, and some lesser known artists to be explored, but the exhibition does little more than frustratingly whet the appetite. Millet's beautifully painted Between Two Fires presents a tongue-in cheek view of Puritan England but does so with the soft subtlety of Dutch genre and some impeccable still life painting. Parsons is represented by two loose, lively landscapes: In the Vegetable Garden is all heat and high summer, When Nature Painted All Things Gay, cool and spring-like. Letters, photographs and book illustrations add layers but it is never really enough.

In the second tiny section of the two room show we are taken off on a series of tangents. Philip Burne Jones' portrait of Elgar is included to illustrate the composer's connections to Broadway and Sargent.  Watercolour is an excuse to exhibit works by other members of the RWS, the importance of France for these artists is enough of a reason to show a Renoir and Pissarro from the Worcester collections and one wall is given over to landscapes of the Worcester countryside. Is this a lack of curatorial discipline or simply a lack of material? Either way feels like an opportunity squandered. Yet, as ever, a visit to Worcester's art gallery is an enjoyable experience: it is a well frequented, much-loved venue, staffed by real enthusiasts and with a determination to act rather than simply sit back. They are promising a major renovation and extension project this year which will increase the number of works they can show. In the meantime, An American in Worcestershire  provides a interesting nugget of an exhibition and some really beautiful works. I only hope that at some point in the future the Broadway Colony gets the fuller coverage it deserves.  

Anna Ancher: Painting Light (Dulwich Picture Gallery until March 8 2026)

Anna Ancher, Sunlight in the Blue Room, 1891, Skagens Museum, Skagen, Denmark

The Van Gogh yellow walls of Dulwich's exhibition space create an immediate sunshine glow which seems at odds with the first few paintings in their Anna Ancher retrospective. She is an unfamiliar name, and her association with the Skagen artists - the Newlyn of Denmark - only leads you up the garden path. The walls are really saying, prepare to be surprised. And you will be. A first small, slightly tentative self portrait, gaze obliquely avoiding ours, head on a questioning tilt, is equally misleading. This is, afterall, a woman happy not to gloss over her broken nose. The earthy sludge palette, reiterated in the portrait of Lars Gaihede Whittling a Stick, seems straight out of the realist playbook. But unlike most of her fellow artists, for Ancher this characterful old man is not merely local colour, a salt of the earth type generalisation: she had grown up knowing him and the other villagers she painted. 

Ancher's life story is also open to misinterpretation. An ambitious mother, who saw talent written in the stars when Hans Christian Andersen visited Skagen on the night of Anna's birth. A fortuitous upbringing in the family hotel frequented by the 'colonising' painters and writers. Marriage to one of them, Michael Ancher, who encouraged and supported, and alongside whom she would travel to the artistic hot spots of Europe. This typically dismissive woman artist narrative downplays the clear, personal drive which unfolds through the exhibition in a series of innovative works. Husband frequently painted wife, but she rarely recorded him on canvas - the example here shows him as a country gent, about to go hunting after a good breakfast, rather than a fellow practitioner. Ancher has an unmistakeably independent streak.

The exhibition begins quietly, but this was a woman in a hurry to learn her craft. Maid in a Kitchen is repurposed Dutch genre, plain interior, soft lighting and subdued colours whose earthiness is now warmed by the central red streak of the woman's dress and the buttery light coming through the curtain. Elsewhere she has a German Renaissance eye for detail - the piles of coins on  Stine Bollerhus' table, rabbits in a cottage - and an occasional drift into caricature. It is Sunlight in the Blue Room where we see Ancher really arrive: strong, complementary colour - blue walls and orange curtains - bold patterns and light streaming in, slicing objects, slapping the child's back; eating her hair, as one contemporary critic put it.  Light has gone from a source of illumination to a tangible, tactile thing. The title says it all - the painting shows Ancher's daughter but she is not the subject.

Once light appears it is everywhere. The late, unframed Evening Sun in the Artist's Studio dissolves solid objects - the corner of the room is barely defined, the walls seem to bulge - and solidifies the sun. The grid pattern of light on the wall is painted with thick, impasto dashes of pinks and oranges that soak into the blue background tingeing it with warmth and seep across the floor like a pool of liquid. Skagen was famous for its clear light: Harvesters wade through golden corn under a blue sky, both bleached and cooled by it. For Ancher, however, it is less about the objective clarity it could offer, more about the aesthetic impact. Her landscapes have an Expressionist disregard for observed reality, instead offering up pinks and mauves and oranges so that Skagen becomes a place of Hansel and Gretel houses. There is more than a dash of Edvard Munch, in both these and in her repeated depiction of aging and death, but there is none of the Norwegian's angst and edge. a view of Daphnesvej, a street dedicated to local fisherman who gave their lives to help a shipwreck is an empty but not eerie place.

Anna Ancher, A Field Sermon, 1903, Skagens Museum, Skagen

Along with light there is so much life. Friendship and family, gardens and comfortable interiors, plants and flowers. You occasionally wonder about the other side of this: a painting of Ancher's sisters, the ones who carried on running in the hotel, shows them glum and exhausted, leaving you to wonder what they thought of the favoured daughter's success and escape. Then there are the oddities: the enigmatic symbolism of Grief, supposedly inspired by a dream - artistic experiment or personal exploration? And Field Sermon, one of her few big set pieces, with its chilly hillside, disconnected crowd, and weedy preacher whose voice you imagine getting lost on the wind. Is it Ancher's jaundiced view of a religion she abandoned after her childhood, or some kind of artistic riposte to the Skagen style. In either case it is one of the less convincing works on show. 

In the end it is the private experiments which have the most impact, including works discovered in a drawer as late as 2014. Anna Ancher was a one off, plotting a course towards reduction and abstraction, driven by a desire to pin down the ephemeral and the allusive, not just to capture a moment, but to solidify and preserve light itself. Dulwich have made a habit of showcasing women and other lesser known artists (their next show is dedicated to Estonian Konrad Magi). Thanks to them Ancher may now gain the kind of recognition in the UK that she deserves and which she currently enjoys in her homeland. 

'A Gap in the Clouds' (Heong Gallery, Cambridge until Feb 8 2026)

Paul Nash, Spring Landscape, 1914, Jerwood Collection

The Heong, Downing College's pocket-sized art venue, is one of Cambridge's unfeted gems, putting on thoughtful, left-field exhibitions of largely contemporary art. In the last year they've given us, amongst others, Gillian Ayres, volcanoes and now A Gap in the Clouds, billed as an exploration of 'landscape as a way to navigate the relationship between our mental lives and the world around us' but really a show as amorphous, shifting and indefinable as the title suggests. The gallery space has large windows which look out onto elegant college grounds. Previous shows have effectively brought the outside in by including sculpture but here the restrained, constrained nature provides an anchor for the art to pull against.  Andreas Eriksson's spindly bronze, Content is a Glimpse, is like a warped hourglass, standing in dialogue with the Barbara Hepworth beyond the glass, creates silhouette at once more fragile and more solid than the monumental bronze. 

To describe a show that includes Edvard Munch's Melancholy and Ai Weiwei's Wheatfield with Crows as eclectic seems an understatement. Munch's brooding figure is subsumed into a pathetic fallacy of exaggerated perspective and wintery sky, confronted in the bottom left by an animalistic shoreline. Ai Weiwei's inspiration is art, not nature, one of a series of lego recreations which plasticise and politicise over-familiar paintings, in this case with the inclusion of drones. (Added resonance for anyone who saw Anselm Kiefer's reinterpretation of the same painting at the RA this summer). There is precious little overt connection between any of the works here, and in many ways that is the point.

Rachel Howard, You Can Save Me, 2015, Jerwood Collection

Just as you can look up at the sky and see animals, cities or nothing at all, so, the curators assert, artists can take nature, real and imagined, and run with it in all manner of different directions. Two Paul Nash's and David Jones (an artist well represented at that other great Cambridge institution, Kettle's Yard) bring conventionality; Frank Walter's tiny enclosure of bar-like  trees and Yto Barrada's lush turquoises also exploit landscape traditions. Kim Bohie's Towards makes you as languid as the black dog sprawled in the foreground, lazing on a Sunday suburban afternoon. These three have been loaned by the Roberts Collection, Nash and Jones come from Jerwood, but the curators have cast a wide net here and the effort pays off.

Many other works explore landscape through abstraction: Koo Jeong A's minimal monochrome blobs could be mushrooms or microscopic amoebae; Rachel Howard's delicate spidery greys suggest woodgrain, water, mist; Peter Lanyon's Sharp Grass is all gesture. You can start to wonder if the connections are too loose, but this in itself generates a mindfulness of its own. The curation is clean yet quirky: sizes, sight-levels and a consistently uneven rhythm keep you looking. There is a beautiful juxtaposition between Wheatfield, which dominates the end wall of the gallery, and the echoing colours of Latifa Echakhch's gleaming abstraction like falling leaves. The whole exhibition hangs by an intangible thread, teetering on the brink of nothingness. Can you see the gap in the clouds? It is worth going to find out. 

Jacques Louis David (The Louvre until January 26 2026)

Jacques Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, 1784-5, The Louvre, Paris

The Louvre is the only museum in the world that could host a Jacques Louis David retrospective and even they struggle. The sheer scale, not to mention fragility, of his canvases means that you need to detour into the main collection to see Brutus, Leonidas and the Coronation of Napoleon. And the scale of the works presents near insurmountable difficulties within the show itself. The Oath of the Horatii, a whole wallful, of machismo minimalism is detached from a lovely line of its preparatory drawings. The huge discrepancy in scale between the two versions of Belisarius Begging for Alms means that they too are placed annoyingly far apart and one is forced to peer through the crowds to  compare the ways David responded to criticism of the first version.

The show starts strongly with a wall text reclaiming David as an artist of passion. Personally, I think this is a less radical line than the curators suggest - no one can look at Napoleon Crossing the Alps and not feel the artist's patriotic commitment - and even in the earlier austere works, the passion is there pent-up with almost volcanic intensity. In any case the labelling never follows the argument through, veering instead towards connoisseur-y blandness. To push the passion point, they stress David's enthusiasm for Caravaggio. Yet, apart from the obvious borrowing in Cupid and Psyche, David's early work seems more influenced by a more generalised infusion of Italian Baroque, exemplified by his St Jerome, one of the few less familiar works on show.

There is also friction between a  desire to stress his individual genius, and an acknowledgement of David's deliberate campaign to court success. His early career is a masterclass in experimenting with what worked and his ruthless pursuit of Academic success, represented by the annual Prix de Rome competition. The formula he fixed on - a combination of Poussin restraint, Greuze emotion and Baroque drama, with a nice sideline in a more Rococo femininity should the subject demand it - is perfectly illustrated by Andromache Mourning the Body of Hector. Andromache's ostentatious grief is counterbalanced by the shallow depth and empty background, both of which look forward to the Death of Marat. The decaying beauty of the corpse lends a hard-edged melodrama, to a scene which might become too saccharine.

These grand machines are balanced through the show by David's portraits, of himself, his family and of patrons. There is a deceptive mastery here as apparent in the early intimate informality of Dr Alphonse Leroy sitting at his cluttered desk, disturbed from his studies, quill in hand, as in the late poignant pomposity of fellow-exile, Comte de Turenne, proudly showing his family crest on the inside of his hat, sporting his disgraced Napoleonic medals. Most striking if all are the small pencil sketches of fellow prisoners during the period when they, and David himself, had no ideal whether they would live or die. Grim defence and resignation are etched into each profile. The extraordinary Tennis Court Oath fragment, as impossibly huge an undertaking, and as destined to failure, as the political ambitions it represented, pits precisely rendered portraits incongruously against preparatory idealised nude torsos. The exhibition choses not to investigate David's artistic method beyond this and a few sketches - it seems an omission.

Jacques Louis David, The Oath of the Tennis Court (fragment), c.1970-2, Palace of Versailles

Was David the great survivor or a man increasingly clutching at straws? The exhibition hedges its bets, obliquely referencing his difficult relationship with Napoleon and treating the years of exile in Brussels almost as a postscript. The extraordinary Mars disarmed by Venus simply compounds the conundrum. Here juxtaposed with Ingres’ huge and extraordinary Jupiter and Thetis, the curators suggest David is satirising his pupil's louche eroticism. Yet one can trace that lingering rococo softness throughout Davids art through works like The Love of Paris and Helen. Here he combines that with the bolder, hard edged colouration and fussier complexity which can be seen developing in his work from 1800 onwards.

The Louvre presents an unmissable exhibition by a standout artist. The shows tells the narrative, gives the political background and generates at least a sense of David the man. Ultimately, it plays safe, focusing on his unique genius at the expense of saying anything really new or inciteful. He is a painter inexorably connected to politics, and perhaps a more adventurous show might have tried to focus more on his art, his methods, his role as a teacher and inspirer, rather than trot out the revolutionary line. But standing in front of the Death of Marat, none of that matters. The mottled background creating just that hint of emotional swirl, the impeccable simplicity of the packing chest memorial and the stark, emptiness of it all which takes you right back to immediate, stunned silence of 1793. There is no other artist who can say so much, so quietly.

'Turner: Always Contemporary' (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool until Feb 22 2026)

JMW Turner, The Wreck Buoy, 1849, Sudley House, Liverpool

Amidst the 2025 avalanche of Turner anniversary exhibitions, Walker Art Gallery's press office somehow managed the coup of getting their show featured on BBC national news, giving Turner: Always Contemporary a status not even Tate Britain's big show has achieved. There was a certain level of expectation, therefore, and there was a definite buzz in the air on the busy, soggy weekday I visited. The title, and indeed the opening work - Jeff Koon's otherworldly-blue Gazing Ball which enables you to reflect on yourself reflecting on an enlarged and precise Turner reproduction - give the sense that this is about Turner's influence on other artists. However, the show offers a more subtle, although perhaps also more controversial, argument, that Turner is always someone in whom we can see ourselves. 

The Walker have largely drawn on their own Liverpool museums collections (I visited Sudley House the same day and found it denuded of Turners) and there is a lack of both individual show-stoppers, and of variety. The stand-out example on canvas is The Wreck Buoy, perhaps in part because it is a work which encapsulates Turner's whole career, started in 1807, praised by Ruskin, reworked into late atmospheric imprecision. Many of the other canvases, however, seem rooted in the languid language of Claude: a succession of soft, solar infusions which turn Scotland, Germany and Switzerland into little Italys. They finally dissolve completely into an abstracted pool of near-white light more blast furnace than sun: unsigned and unexhibited, one can argue over whether he considered it finished or not. However, although the exhibition hints at the well-worn Impressionist, modernist narrative that Turner was an artist who started in the seventeenth century and ended up in the twentieth, its thematic structure successfully counteracts this.

In fact, the large scale oils are less interesting than the works on paper which exemplify Turner as an artist of much greater variety and far less pomposity. The wall of Liber Studiorum prints has everything from humour, to tragedy, picturesque, topography and drama. Vertiginous alpine scenes, dissolving Venice, bustling fishermen, leisured ladies with the world at their feet. Turner's eye for observed detail is striking, his ability to see a composition even more so: Lancaster from the Aqueduct from c. 1825 has it all, industrial chimneys, ancient castle, resting and active figures, nature and man, all given an ethereal grandeur which elevates an inconsequential slice of northern England.

George Grainger Smith, The Enemy Raid, 3rd May 1941, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

The exhibition intersperses Turner with an eclectic, in some cases almost random, selection of artists from both the 19th century and the present day. Monet is an obvious choice, although, Break-up of the Ice on the Seine, near Bennecourt is not his most obviously Turneresque work. The Pissarro represented is Lucien rather than Camille - again perhaps a case of what was available rather than what was most apt. G F Watts almost steals the show with two landscapes which out-Turner Turner with their luminous, literally gold-backed, abstraction. However, it is the less obvious and less well-known examples which really strike home. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites are melded by Ruskin's enthusiasm and the bright airiness of John Brett and, later, Annie Swynnerton resonates. Locally based George Grainger Smith channels The Burning of the Houses of Parliament into Liverpool's Blitz. Too often, however, the connection is strained: Sheila Fell's moody vertical canvas is all earth not air and Bridget Riley's Egyptian colours form an odd dialogue with Venetian watercolours, especially as she is an avowed Turner agnostic. 

Curator Melissa Gustin's unexpected move is to investigate 'always contemporary' not just as aesthetic influence but in ideological terms. The thematic sections are not afraid to foreground post-colonial and environmental ideas to suggest a sometimes tenuous continuity. Emma Stebbins documentation of glacial recession can be directly linked to locations visited by Turner (and Barns-Graham in the 1950s) and her works provide a strong ending. I am less enthusiastic about the curators pulling out coal-mining, china-making, shipping and slavery and their inclusion of commercial off-shoots like Turner Doc Martins seems more gimmick than substance. Turner does not need to be presented as some kind of artistic Nostradamus, nor do we need to be shunted towards 'relevance'. 

Ethel Walker, Seascape, 1925-50, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Nevertheless, this is an hugely enjoyable and effective show. Gustin has admitted to using the Turner brand as an excuse to explore artists and ideas which interest her and the gutsy labelling ('Green Unpleasant Land' is bound to cause some mutterings) and unexpected curatorial choices - Ethel Walker's energetic seascape is a real treat - mean that there is always something to get your teeth into. Do we need Damien Hirst's sharks? Probably not, but in a year which has lauded Turner as an unparalleled practitioner, it is good to bring him down to earth, alongside fellow artists, across time. This is really a celebration of the multifarious ways nature has, to paraphrase Maggi Hambling, grabbed artists by the short and curlies. The ever-inquisitive, thrill-seeking Turner would have loved it and so did I.