Ray Turner, a descendent of J.M.W. Turner, is going to parliament at the end of the month asking for the country to honor the terms of his ancestor's legacy — which have been ignored for the last 160 years. Turner has also threatened not to leave his six-figure estate to the Royal Academy or Tate museum as he first intended. "The track record of those institutions and the… government is abysmal when it comes to respecting the wishes of the Turner family wills," he told the Guardian. J.M.W. Turner's heir might be entitled to ask for the paintings to be returned to the family if the wishes of his forbear failed to be addressed properly — though this is disputed. 

J.M.W. Turner died in 1851, leaving about 300 paintings and 30,000 drawings as well as a large sum of money to the nation. This bequest came with clear conditions: the pictures were to be housed in a custom-built "Turner Gallery" at the National Gallery, and the cash used for the foundation of an almshouse for elderly artists in the South London suburb of Twickenham.

None of these conditions, however, were to be fulfilled. After the painter's death, his family challenged the will. Thanks to the 1736 Mortmain law, which protects heirs against their dead relatives who had "that delirious ambition of erecting palaces for beggars," they managed in 1856 to recover the sum — only £20,000 of which (equivalent to about $1.6 million in today's money) went to the Royal Academy.

Today, the paintings — estimated at $1.6 billion — are split between the National Gallery and the Tate, and this despite a Select Committee stating in 1861 that the nation was still bound to respect the painter's conditions. With its share of Turner's money and in honor of his memory, the RA set up a premium prize that, they claim, is still awarded today. When contacted by ARTINFO UK, they were unable to say when or to whom the last prize had been given. "Turner's will was poorly drafted and any chance of fulfilling his intentions was ruined when his family contested it," the RA stated.

Ray Turner is not alone in his quest for justice. In fact, the main player in this venture might not be him, but Selby Whittingham, a Turner scholar who launched the Turner Society in 1975, "specifically," he wrote to ARTINFO UK, "to reunite the Turner Bequest." It was only two years ago that Ray Turner was able to track down his lineage to J.M.W. Turner. He blogged about it and caught the attention of Whittingham, who might have seen him as a way to grant more weight to his efforts of the last 35 years.

In his article "Art Charities Strike Gold?" Whittingham wrote that the 2005 Charity Commission "finally decided that in point of law the bequest was received free of Turner's conditions" — though he told ARTINFO UK today that the full details hadn't been announced.

Ray Turner and Whittingham are about to meet the House of Lords' All-Party Arts & Heritage Group to discuss the 1861 Select Committee's conclusion that Turner's conditions had to be fulfilled. The pair has abandoned the hospital for the elderly part of the bequest ("the money is gone, it's rather impossible," said Whittingham), but they are determined to raise awareness of the need for a "Turner Gallery" at the National Gallery.

When asked what the public would gain from a Turner Gallery, the scholar said: "I think a lot of people agree that his bequested pictures would gain a lot in coherence and interest if shown together." "The National Gallery, Tate and the Royal Academy all blame the greed of Turner's cousins for thwarting his wishes," he wrote in a follow-up email. "In fact the failure to construct a Turner Gallery as he wished was entirely due to failures of the National Gallery (the decision on where the gallery should be failed to be made for years) and the failure of successive governments to spend enough on gallery space. But since the creation of the National Lottery there has been plenty of money for new museums, some of it wasted on worthless projects."

"We are thinking about putting one of these e-petitions together, to see if we can generate some support, certainly on the painting side, getting them housed correctly," said Ray Turner. "We haven't actually finalized the exact wording of the petition, but we are looking to do that in the next few weeks"— which seems to be leaving it quite late for a hearing less than a month away.

Given the option, would he consider claiming the paintings back? "I don't think I would consider doing it, no," answered Ray Turner. "It probably wouldn't do me any good at the moment anyway because my uncle would probably inherit them because he is more closely related to Thomas Price Turner than I am. What would I do with one or more Turner paintings? I can hardly hang them off a rusty nail in the garage, can I? They are better left in the museum really." Contacted by ARTINFO UK, the Tate declined to comment.