J.M.W. Turner

J. M. W. Turner pushed landscape painting to the edge of abstraction half a century before anyone followed him. Born in Covent Garden in 1775, the son of a barber and wigmaker who displayed his drawings in the shop window, he entered the Royal Academy Schools at fourteen and exhibited there at fifteen. His mother died in an asylum. He became the youngest full Academician at twenty-seven and was professor of perspective from 1807. He was financially successful early and remained so, which is unusual for a painter who ended up where he did. He worked ferociously — tens of thousands of sketches survive — touring Britain and then, after the Napoleonic wars, the Alps, the Rhine, Venice and Rome. Venice, where light comes off water in every direction, changed his handling permanently. His early work is topographical and follows Claude Lorrain, whom he admired to the point of stipulating that two of his paintings hang beside Claudes in the National Gallery. From the 1830s the subject increasingly dissolves: Snow Storm, Rain, Steam and Speed, and the late Norham Castle series are built from atmosphere, with structure barely indicated. Critics called them soapsuds and whitewash, and Turner replied that he wondered what they thought the sea was like. The Fighting Temeraire of 1839 shows a warship from Trafalgar towed to the breakers by a black steam tug at sunset, and is usually read as an elegy for sail. He claimed to have been lashed to a mast in a storm to observe it. He lived secretively under an assumed name in Chelsea, and left his finished works to the nation in 1851.

• Lived: 1775 CE – 1851 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: painter