Sarah Urwin Jones

Joseph William Mallord Turner - Bill, to his friends - the painter of light, steam and haze, of mythology, history and place, has long since, alongside his contemporary rival Constable, been regarded as one of Britain's greatest painters. This year alone, the "last great Turner in private hands" - a view of Rome from Mount Aventine - sold for a staggering £30.3million, whilst a blockbuster show at Tate Britain reassessed the once-held view of late Turner as that of an artist in decline. Then, too, came Mike Leigh's film, Mr Turner, the notoriously belligerent artist brought to life by a curmudgeonly Timothy Spall.

One might, then, expect a slightly greater footfall for the Scottish National Gallery's annual and hugely popular January showing of the Vaughan Bequest, a lovely collection of 38 of the artist's stunning watercolours that lie undisturbed in the gallery vaults for eleven months of the year, protected from the light which Turner made so much use of in his evocative landscapes.

And these luminous watercolours are sparkling examples of Turner's use of that light, which, over the course of his career, came to dominate his best known oil paintings, from the sparkling waters of Venice: The Dogana and San Maggiore in 1834 to his later works in which the light itself obscures the solid forms, from the train in Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway (1844) to the yellow haze of Sunrise with Sea Monsters (1845).

This evanescence of the solid or the real made Turner, who had achieved huge popularity in his early career for his accurate topographical paintings, as avant-garde to his contemporaries as some recipients of the eponymous Prize of our own times. But if his contemporaries, with the exception of those such as the influential critic John Ruskin, did not appreciate this development in his work, his influence on subsequent generations of landscape painters has endured.

Turner was a travelling man, who excelled in the drama of the snatched vista, the vision from the heart of the storm. The wilder stories of Turner's search to find himself right within the elements, to live the elements, are largely considered apocryphal, although they have endured. Indeed the story that he lashed himself to the mast of a boat to observe the snowstorm in the 1842 work of the same name that presented a whirlwind view of a Steamboat in trouble off a harbour mouth was always defended by the artist.

But if Turner sketched copiously in notebooks that he carried around with him, he painted, largely - and unlike his contemporary Constable - from his studio, layering oils in 'glazes' to create the translucent effect that so marks out his romantic style. And he was not afraid to subjugate the real to the artful on canvas in works which veered increasingly towards what we might consider abstraction. If, once safely back in his studio, he required an impossible sunbeam to strike a sail to highlight it against the dark and raging seas and thick cloudcover, so be it.

Turner's paintings have, in their heart, that same reverence of nature that drove his literary contemporaries, from Coleridge to Keats. In there, too, is the very real idea of man battling with increasingly monstrous elements, whether natural, mythological or historical, his imagination marrying with the 'truth' in his sketchbook to create scenes which frequently seem fantastical and allusive, yet with utter veracity.

The development of that particular vision is part of the joy of the Vaughan Bequest, whose works span the painter's career, from early topographical views to late sketches whilst on the hoof around Europe, worked up from the pen and sketchbook of the artist who, even in his seventies, never stopped 'looking out for storms and shipwrecks.'

Turner in January

Scottish National Gallery, The Mound, Edinburgh

(0131 624 6200; www.nationalgalleries.org)

Until 31st January

Daily, 10am - 5pm; Thurs until 7pm