Joseph Mallord William Turner

From his beginnings as a topographical watercolorist to his mature investigations of the sublime, J. M. W. Turner dominated British landscape painting throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. He was born in London, but spent much of his childhood with relatives in Middlesex and Kent. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1789, was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1799, and received full status as an academician in 1802. In 1807 he was appointed to a professorship in perspective at the Academy, a position he held for thirty years. Turner's pedagogical commitment also inspired (in part) his publication of the Liber Studiorum (1807-1819), a series of etchings and mezzotints of diverse types of landscape made after his own designs. Turner's first exhibited works (from 1790) were watercolors of architectural subjects. His paintings of the 1790s are mostly landscapes and marines influenced by Thomas Girtin (1775-1802), Richard Wilson (1713/14-1782), and the old masters (especially Claude Lorrain). In 1802 Turner undertook a tour of Switzerland, the first of many continental journeys that inspired his vision of landscape; it was followed by trips to Italy, northern Europe, and several return visits to the Alps, as well as frequent tours of the north and west of England. Turner's watercolors and oil paintings proclaim his innovative technical virtuosity: full of movement and drama, they investigate the mutable effects of light and atmosphere in compositions that frequently border on abstraction.

Turner died in Chelsea (now London) on 19 December 1851. His much-contested will bequeathed to the British nation more than 300 oil paintings and 20,000 drawings (Tate Gallery, London).