JMW Turner: The Complete Story
JMW Turner was the British master of light, the painter who melted ships, storms and sunsets into pure color decades before the Impressionists were born. Secretive, restless and fiercely ambitious, he pushed landscape so far that it edged toward abstraction, and he left thousands of works and a fortune to his country.
People who only know calm English watercolors are not ready for late Turner, where the world almost disappears into light.
The painter of light
Turner was obsessed with light and weather. Early on he could paint a precise harbor or ruin, but year by year the solid world dissolved in his hands until his late canvases became storms of gold, white and grey. He pushed Romantic landscape somewhere nobody had taken it before.
The Slave Ship and the Fighting Temeraire
Two paintings sum up his range. The Slave Ship of 1840 turns a real atrocity, drowned captives thrown overboard, into a furnace of red sea and sky, a piece of moral fury. The Fighting Temeraire, an old warship towed away to be broken up, became so loved that Britain later voted it the nation's favorite painting.
The man who tied himself to a mast
Turner wanted to paint a storm from the inside. The story goes that he had himself lashed to a ship's mast for four hours in a blizzard to feel it, then painted Snow Storm from memory. True or not, it is exactly the kind of risk his pictures feel like.
Watercolor and endless travel
He was one of the greatest watercolor painters who ever lived, travelling across Britain and Europe with a sketchbook, chasing light through the Alps and along the Rhine. He made tens of thousands of works on paper.
The secret life
For all his fame, Turner guarded his private world. In his last years he lived quietly in Chelsea under a false name, Mr Booth, with his companion Sophia Booth, and let almost no one in. He shaped the young Claude Monet, who studied his work in London and never forgot it.
The showman of varnishing day
Turner loved to win. On the varnishing days before a show opened, when painters could touch up their work on the gallery wall, he would finish a canvas in public to upstage his rivals. In one famous moment he dropped a single dab of bright red into a grey seascape hanging next to a quiet Constable, pulling every eye to his own picture. Constable grumbled that Turner had been in and fired a gun. He guarded his methods and let the legends grow around him.
What he left behind
When he died in 1851 he left the bulk of his work to the British nation: around three hundred paintings and tens of thousands of drawings and watercolors, the Turner Bequest. The country is still unpacking it.
Quick answers about JMW Turner
Who was JMW Turner? The leading British Romantic landscape painter, a master of light.
When was he born? In London, in 1775.
How did he die? In Chelsea, London, in 1851.
What is he famous for? The Fighting Temeraire and the Slave Ship.
What movement did he belong to? Romanticism, pointing ahead to Impressionism.
Where can I see his work? Tate Britain in London holds the great Turner Bequest.
The Turner Prize, the most famous and most argued over art award in Britain, is named after him. A painter who hid his own life now lends his name to the loudest debate in art each year.