His dying wish was to advance the art and give opportunities to future generations of artists

Interesting facts about Joseph Mallord William Turner and what means the most to him as well as everyone else is his dying wish was to advance the art and give opportunities to future generations of artists. He gave his completed paintings to the National Gallery under the condition that a separate gallery is erected to house them. He intended to give the most of his £140,000 inheritance to establish a foundation for "decayed painters" in his will.

While both completed and unfinished paintings and sketches became national property as the Turner Bequest as a consequence of prolonged litigation with his relatively distant family, the majority of the money reverted to them. Sir Joseph Duveen did not construct a specific gallery to hold some of the oil paintings at the Tate Gallery until 1908. After the River Thames flood of 1928, when the storerooms at the Tate Gallery were submerged, all of the drawings and watercolors were moved to the British Museum for safety.

They were later returned to the Tate Gallery upon the opening of the Clore Gallery, an addition created by James Stirling specifically for that purpose, in 1987. The National Gallery still has a handful of the oil works. The Turner Prize funding is given to visual artists under the age of 50 by the Tate Gallery in memory of J. M. W. Turner.