Even the weather - broody, grey and drizzly - seemed perfectly calculated to welcome the works of JMW Turner that will be showing at the National Gallery for the next three months.

The 110 works from Tate National in London cover the whole of Turner's career and development as an artist, from intimate sketches to expansive oil paintings, from grand tableaus to delicate watercolours.

The show opens to the public on Saturday and, judging by the penchant Australian audiences have for Turner, the gallery is expecting large crowds. The last Turner show, staged at the National Gallery in 1996, is the third most popular blockbuster to date.

But gallery director Ron Radford said this latest show would be quite different, with only two of the works shown in the previous exhibition.

Tate National director Caroline Collier said the exhibition had been designed to speak to Australian audiences.

''We don't tour exhibitions for long, in the sense that we like to make exhibitions working very closely with partner galleries and museums, especially with and for them, so we don't trundle these Turners around the world for a long time,'' she said.

''It's a very large collection - there are over 20,000 watercolours, for instance, so you can make lots of variations on a theme. We wanted this exhibition to work here and to speak to a public in Australia, so that's what we're hoping it will do.''

Ms Collier, who was last in Canberra for the 2011 Renaissance exhibition, said it was interesting to see how the gallery transformed the space for each new show. ''Whenever you make an exhibition in a particular place, it does become different, and it becomes a special event, and that's what I think they've managed to do here. They've done something really particular.''

The show is made up of works from Turner's own collection that he built up throughout his career.

''He knew he was a great artist and he kept his best work, so he kept not only the preparatory drawings, the notebooks, the sketchbooks, watercolours, experiments, but his really best paintings, the works he knew to be his masterpieces, right from the beginning to the end of his career,'' Ms Collier said.

''So that collection is really extraordinary because it allows us to make exhibitions, I think, that really do give you an insight into the way he worked, into his practice, into his mind. To me, they're paintings that communicate so directly out of that time straight to the imagination and feelings of people experiencing them now.''

She said it was Turner's technical capacity, and his knowledge of colour and design, that made him so successful and so loved. ''That presence is there, so that's maybe why he's so influential on artists, but also why you can come to this exhibition and get an experience that no one else will have. It goes straight to your own imagination and emotion, and allows you then to imagine yourself, so there's something almost magical about that, of course founded on incredible technical ability.''

Turner from the Tate: The Making of a Master opens on June 1 and runs until September 8. Timed tickets are available through Ticketek.