Joseph Mallord William Turner
Born – London, England 1775
Died – London, England 1851
Joseph Mallord William Turner was, with Constable, one of two outstanding geniuses of British painting in the nineteenth century. He started drawing as a child and was admitted into the Royal Academy School in 1789. A master of topographical drawing, he began to make sketching tours from 1792, filling his sketchbooks with reminders of places that he would later feature in his large-scale landscape compositions. He travelled around Britain and then to Paris, Switzerland and Venice. Turner’s oil and watercolour landscapes referred to mainly historical and seascape scenes; he rarely featured human figures, preferring to focus on the natural elements. These romantic landscapes showed the influence of Claude and Dutch seventeenth-century marine painters. Works from 1830 onward are almost exclusively concerned with light. Turner visited Norham Castle in Northumberland several times and first exhibited a watercolour of the same composition in 1798. Norham Castle: Sunrise is one of the most spare of all his oil paintings – it presents an infinity of space in which the cool grey-blue castle appears like a chimera. Constable’s description, “he seems to paint with tinted steam,” seems especially apt for a work that comes close to abstraction. Turner greatly influenced the Impressionists, Monet and Pissarro both encountering his work for the first time in London.
Masterpieces:
- The Fighting Temeraire
- Sunrise with Sea Monsters
Text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.
Books About joseph mallord william turner
Turner in His Time, Revised and Updated Edition
Andrew Wilton
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Joseph Mallord William Turner
Daniel Ankele
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Turner's Early Sketchbooks: Drawings in England, Wales and Scotland from 1789-1802
Joseph Mallord William Turner
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