When Joseph Mallord William Turner died in 1851, his legacy quickly rose from that of a leading artist to nothing short of a British national treasure. His bequest left his collected works to "the British nation," and now they are almost exclusively housed in London's leading museums, rarely leaving the country.

This makes the current exhibition at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, which opened Tuesday, all the more special an event. The Tate Gallery made "a real sacrifice," in the words of curator Ian Warrell, to fly in the bulk of their Turner collection — comprised here of 112 paintings, watercolors and sketches — for the first show of its kind in Russia since Turner's bicentenary in 1975. A few works, such as his late experimental masterpiece "Norham Castle, Sunrise," are making their first-ever appearance abroad.

This is by great measure the largest Turner show ever to come to Russia and the most expensive exhibition in the Pushkin Museum's history. Funding for this otherwise unrealizable project has been provided in its entirety by Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov, Russia's 18th-richest man and a trustee of the museum.

The exact amount it took to get the paintings off Tate's walls and across Europe was not divulged by Pushkin Museum director Irina Antonova — "I'm not going to say how much it cost," she said with a look of abject horror at Monday's press conference, as Usmanov yawned and thumbed through the exhibition catalogue — but other sources reported that Usmanov put up ?1.5 million ($2.2 million) to underwrite the art's insurance costs.

Yet while much of the talk surrounding the show has been about Usmanov's patronage, another example of how the art world can often seem beholden to the increasing number of Russian oligarchs within it, there is no risk of Usmanov's involvement overshadowing the exhibition — the work is simply that special. As Antonova said: "Turner was nothing short of a great master, a real phenomenon of his time. He made discoveries in painting absolutely nobody else did."

Turner provoked wildly different reactions from his contemporaries, delighting, scandalizing and baffling in equal measure. A consensus gradually formed after his death, however, that he was, in the words of critic John Ruskin, "beyond all doubt, the greatest of the age." It was, in fact, mostly with hindsight that the repercussions of Turner's art became clear.

Tate Gallery Turner, became known for his abstract depictions of nature, using watercolor techniques with oil paint, as in his acclaimed early piece "Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps."

He profoundly impacted not only the Impressionists — after his first encounter with Turner in 1871, Claude Monet remarked that the Englishman painted with "wide-open eyes" — but also the early 20th-century Modernists and the founders of the abstract avant-garde.

Turner is best seen not simply as a precursor to those movements but as a radical himself, who single-handedly altered the direction of European art. As Tate Gallery director Sir Nicholas Serota explained, "Turner is vital because he took landscape painting from the 18th century to the 20th in one bound."

There was little that was typical about Turner. At the age of 15, he was accepted into the Royal Academy as its youngest-ever member and began to exhibit his watercolors after only one year of study. When his first oil painting, "Fishermen at Sea," was shown in 1796, landscape art was considered inferior to the dominant neoclassicist and historical tendencies, while British painting was not thought of very highly at all.

Turner essentially turned both those conceptions on their heads from the very beginning of his career. His early paintings, displayed in the first room of the exhibition, eschew the then-prevalent loftiness of subject in order to capture the "essence" of things.

"First and foremost, Turner wanted to transform our understanding of landscape," said curator Warrell. Whereas before, nature had been painted as still, placid and unremarkable, Turner reveled in unclear, tempestuous, foreboding land and seascapes, using watercolor techniques with oil paint to create uncertainty and capture the etherealness of nature.

This came to the fore in perhaps his most famous early piece, 1812's "Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps." Turner declined to paint Hannibal himself, instead showing his army at the mercy of blurred, black clouds. The miniscule scale on which they are depicted against the storm indicates man's powerlessness against the awesome force of nature, elaborated upon in poetry that Turner published to accompany the painting.

Pushkin museum of Fine Art

This sense was a key component of the Romantic movement, to which Turner was keenly attuned. Where the prevailing trend in neoclassical art and poetry had been toward the "Beautiful," the Romantics turned toward the "Sublime," that which inspired what they believed to be the strongest human emotions — terror and fear.

Moreover, the subject matter invited comparisons with Napoleon — a favorite subject for the Romantics — given his crossing of those same Alps in 1797 and that year's Russian campaign.

Turner, Warrell explained, "understood that he stood at a pivotal moment in history, so he looked for inspiration both to the Old Masters and forward."

In his watercolors, which line the corridor leading to his later works, Turner continued to advance his technique and remain at the vanguard of European painting. "It was with the watercolors that Turner really transformed his art," Warrell said. "The atmosphere is amazing, as are the effects of light."

Here Turner not only produced studies for oil paintings but developed highly individual ways of depicting nature as well, by intensifying color and abandoning detail. These were fully realized in his later paintings, which were met largely with bewilderment and often not even exhibited.

"His contemporaries couldn't understand what he was doing," Warrell said. "And so he really took on his own role, finding something new to say and continually changing the nature of what was considered beautiful in art."

Some of these later works drew considerably on his personal experience. While "Hannibal" had been inspired by a storm Turner witnessed in Norfolk, he claimed to have painted the 1842 "Snow Storm — Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth" after being tied to a ship's mast for four hours, supposedly at his request. "I didn't paint this so that others would understand it," Turner later asserted. "I wanted to show the storm itself."

Other paintings from the period were all but unrecognizable to many. "Moses Writing the Book of Genesis" and "Death on a Pale Horse" are almost solely comprised of intense color and light, closer in style to Turner's artistic heirs than his contemporaries. Though by this point the press had long begun to ignore him, Turner relentlessly continued to blaze his trail until his death. While bedridden and semiconscious, his last words are said to have been "The sun is God!" as if to sum up his approach: to depict nature not as it physically appeared but to convey its spiritual qualities.