JMW Turner was the pre-eminent landscape painter in Western art, according to leading Victorian art critic John Ruskin. But the weight and obsession of the artist's canon suggests he was, above all, and with an relentless obsession, a seascape painter.
Around two-thirds of his hundreds of paintings and sketches concentrated on the sea and, as he reinvented the genre and reinvented himself, it was through the roiling oceans that his vision found its fullest expression.
Turner And The Sea at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, features 100 Turner paintings and sketches including The Fighting Temeraire and Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth.
From his early works from the 1790s that drew their inspiration from the Dutch masters, to the "distinct indistinctness" of his later works, Turner was restless in his attempts to capture the elemental nature of the sea.
He responded to rivals and critics with a body of work that left them breathless and, after his death in 1851, a huge cache of notebooks, sketches and beginnings, bequeathed to the nation and on display, in part, here provided evidence of his application to the task of creating an indomitable legacy.
"In many ways Turner was a sea painter just by sheer dint of concentration of effort into representing the oceans throughout his career," said curator Christine Riding.
This was hardly surprising. It was a time when the British were shaped by the sea.
Turner, born in 1775, spent much of his life and all his formative years with the Navy at war, enforcing and building an empire and, in doing so, embodying the ambition and will of a nation.
Turner even adopted alter-egos with a sea-faring background (notably "Admiral Booth", a name that disguised his tangled private life).
Friends commented on his sailor-like appearance, his gait, his accent, and it was an aspect he encouraged.
"The sea was the dominant force in the psychology of the British when the likes of Byron, Turner, Constable and others were promoting the idea of the British as quintessentially maritime character, something that we've since lost," said Christine.
This link between sea and nation state is captured in The Battle Of Trafalgar, his only royal commission.
Christine said: "This is around the largest work he created, 1822-24, commissioned by George IV as part of an installation at St James's Palace.
"Turner went beyond the idea of representing the battle as it was fought but tried to encapsulate the ship of state, trying to capture the significance of the battle some years after the event itself.
"He is processing it as someone who experienced the initial news about the battle and some years later thinking what it meant."
The work belongs to the National Maritime Museum, which helps confirm the view that the exhibition is a compelling adjunct to the new Nelson, Navy, Nation gallery upstairs.
Christine said: "I knew from the outset what we wanted here was a world class Turner exhibition. We wanted to show Turner in breadth and depth and quality that underlines a new theme, a subject that hasn't been explored in exhibitions to quite the depth of this show - that Turner was a primarily a sea painter.
"The other thing I was clear about was that this exhibition would be an art show but you would walk out into the National Maritime Museum and the context of Maritime Greenwich that was so powerful to Turner.
"It's a very powerful setting for an exhibition of this kind. It is unique in terms of its quality and ambition but also because this is the first Turner show in Greenwich.
"My hope is people come round the show and then go out into the museum and look at Nelson's jacket, and look at a harpoon that's used for whaling because we have all that material here, we don't need to bring it into the show because the context is the museum itself."
Until April 2014, National Maritime Museum, £10 adults, rmg.co.uk.
