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J.M.W. Turner, Ancient Rome; Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus, exhibited 1839, oil paint on canvas, 91.4 x 121.9 cmCourtesy of Tate Photography

Major touring art exhibitions are rarely the same from one venue to the next, for a variety of reasons. Lenders drop out, certain canvases can't travel, or the available rooms in one museum are smaller than those in another.

Even in this context, there's a dollop of overstatement in the Art Gallery of Ontario's announcement that it will be the only Canadian stop for "a critically acclaimed solo exhibition from Tate Britain" of late paintings by J.M.W. Turner. The Tate show included more than 150 works; the AGO will show around 50.

Those oil paintings and watercolours will all come from the Tate's own ample Turner collection, much of which arrived in 1856 as a bequest from the painter's estate. The 100 or so works in the original show that were borrowed from private collections and museums outside Britain will not be seen in Toronto, which is receiving essentially the same pared-down selection shown at the Getty Center in Los Angeles earlier this year.

Fifty-odd Turners at any time would still be a coup for the AGO, and is so especially now. Popular awareness of Turner was bumped up considerably last year by Mike Leigh's film Mr. Turner, which won wide critical acclaim and was nominated for four Oscars.

Turner was a Cockney of modest origins who began as a topographical draftsman, but who by his mid-20s was an acclaimed landscape painter and member of the Royal Academy. Occasional attacks by conservative critics did nothing to limit his growing fame and fortune, or the crush of commissions from owners of estates and castles.

The Tate exhibition offered a newly comprehensive view of Turner's work during the last 15 years of his life, when his landscapes generally became more luminous and less defined. But it also challenged the notion that this trend was a one-way development, by showing some very finished and less abstract paintings he made a year before his death in 1851.

The show also ignited new speculation about the possible effects on Turner's art of the infirmities that marked his later years. The painter suffered from hand tremors, which he partially controlled with alcohol, and cataracts.

The AGO's exhibition, which opens Oct. 31, features such important works as Fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London and Ancient Rome: Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus. However it will not include several pieces much feted in London, including Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino, which was first exhibited with the Ancient Rome painting in 1839, and seldom seen with it since.

"It was during this last, most fruitful period of [Turner's] life that his art was most misunderstood," says Lloyd DeWitt, the AGO's curator of European art, who will co-ordinate installation of the show in Toronto. "Nonetheless, he carried on experimenting with unusual subject matters and different canvas formats and mastering his free and spontaneous techniques in both oil and watercolour."

A 250-page catalogue produced for the Tate Britain exhibition, which was called Late Turner: Painting Set Free, will be available during the Toronto run. As always when a big show becomes a smaller one on the road, it will be interesting to compare that document's vision of Turner with the one presented on the walls of the AGO.

J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free, runs at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from Oct. 31 through Jan. 31, 2016 (ago.net).

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