Iconic Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood has taken his admiration for the celebrated artist JMW Turner to a whole new level by purchasing the very home where Turner spent his final days. This historic residence, a Grade II-listed 18th-century house located on Chelsea’s Cheyne Walk, serves as a testament to Wood’s deep appreciation for the legendary painter.

Cheyne Walk, once affectionately dubbed “Rolling Stones Row,” has been home to other members of the band, including Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Ronnie Wood, himself an accomplished artist whose portraits of music legends have fetched up to £21,000, has long been captivated by Turner’s artistic genius.

JMW Turner, hailed as perhaps the greatest British artist, continues to leave an indelible mark on the art world 250 years after his birth. His dramatic and emotive landscapes and seascapes still resonate deeply, with works like “The Fighting Temeraire” of 1839 frequently being celebrated as the pinnacle of British art. Wood shares how Turner’s creations have a profound effect on him.

“Turner’s impact on me is so profound that it often drives me straight to my studio,” Wood explains. “I have several studios around the world, and when I’m there, I feel possessed and inspired by his genius. I am endlessly fascinated by his use of color and the texture of his paint. Engaging with his work always leaves me in awe and excitement.”

Wood elaborates on the significant influence Turner has had on both his painting and his music: “Turner has inspired me throughout my artistic and musical journeys. I’ve always kept my art supplies handy while touring, capturing sketches along the way. To me, sketching is much like composing a song.”

At the start, he adds: “You have the sketch of a melody, and then you take it into the studio and embroider it and develop the song until you have the final mix. Turner’s work shows that same drive and inspiration.”

Ronnie, 78, has been passionate about art since the age of 10, when he entered a BBC competition show entitled The Sketch Club. He is convinced that all artistic people – from Turner to himself – have a common thread running through them, saying: “I think some people are just creative, and this can be expressed in a number of ways. Bob Dylan and David Bowie create both music and art.”

In the same way: “When I get intimate with my paintings, it’s a really good spiritual thing to get off my chest. Same as playing the instruments is a great release.”

Turner’s stormy depictions of the natural world are also clearly a great release for the artist. Ronnie, who has been a member of the Rolling Stones since 1975, says Turner’s tumultuous character is unleashed in his brooding paintings. 

He cites Turner’s outstanding 1806 picture, Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, as a particularly strong example of that. The piece is a visceral portrayal of a Swiss waterfall. Turner brings it to life so vividly that you can almost feel the water tumbling down between the rocks.

“When I look at this work in particular,” Ronnie says, “it’s the epitome of drama.  The swirling, the action, the movement of the paint, the thickness of the paint, is amazing. He just used that oil paint itself to express turbulence and unrest.”

Turner was a restless artist and he was so anxious to commune with nature that, in order to experience its raw, untrammelled force, he once lashed himself to the mast of a ship in the midst of a violent hurricane.

Ronnie is also deeply affected by Turner’s devastating 1840 painting The Slave Ship, which documents the Zong massacre of 1781. In this horrific event, the captain of British ship The Zong commanded his crew to throw overboard 132 African slaves – men, women and children – so he could claim the insurance money for their deaths. 

Underscoring man’s inhumanity to man, the crew of The Zong left on the slaves’ manacles to ensure that they could not avoid drowning. This appalling massacre, a pivotal event in hastening the abolition of slavery in Britain, is recounted in Turner’s masterpiece.  

Painting an extraordinary red and yellow sky over the slaves being dragged under the waves, the artist used the picture to illustrate his central theme of “the sublime”. By that, he meant the complete impotence and terror of humanity when confronted by the overriding power of nature. 

Ronnie reflects: “He’s painting the absolute turmoil of this ship spilling its cargo of humans. That caught me. I was very moved by this. He’s painted his own emotion into this work.”

The musician contributes to an enthralling new BBC documentary, Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks, which airs on Wednesday. The film reveals Turner’s previously concealed psychology through his 37,000 private sketches, drawings, and watercolours.

This unrivalled archive uncovers the man behind the masterpieces. Many of these sketches have never been shown on television before. They feature erotic drawings which experts hitherto believed had been lost.

These works provide a glimpse into Turner’s psyche, baring his innermost thoughts, creative obsessions and emotional strife. They offer a rich, multilayered profile of an artist regarded as both visionary and vulnerable. Ronnie is in awe of the intensity that pours out of Turner’s sketchbooks.

“They remind me a lot of Rodin and Toulouse- Lautrec and Picasso in the houses of ill repute, in that they are incredibly descriptive.

“The artists have to go through that experience, that private place, to find their creativity.”  The guitarist shows his reverence for the great artists of the past by copying their work. “One year I’m Delacroix, another year I’m Picasso, another year I’m Caravaggio.

“I like to believe I come out with copies of their work that take it my own way. I did the same with Turner because he is so expressive.”

One Turner painting that Ronnie has struggled to copy fully, though, is The Slave Ship. He says: “It is a bothersome thing when you think of the slave ship. I copied that one, but in my interpretation, I left out the slaves because I couldn’t handle it, it was so unfair. But it was a stamp of the times.”

During his lifetime Turner was a misunderstood artist who was emotionally fragile and may well have been neurodivergent. 

The critic Sir George Beaumont called Turner: “The artist who has misled the taste of the entire nation.” Meanwhile, the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray asked of The Slave Ship: “Is the painting sublime or ridiculous?”

But Ronnie defends Turner to the hilt: “The film says that people didn’t understand him and that he was losing it.

“But there’s so much behind those clouds and that action and that weather and those billows of confusion. That is the stirring part.  It doesn’t matter about the politics or the age or what the hell was going on. It’s good to make people aware and get inside a painter’s mind.”

What has Turner given Ronnie over many decades, then? An immense amount of satisfaction.

● Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks is on BBC Two at 9pm on Wednesday.