Joseph Mallord William Turner was an English artist famous for his romantic landscape watercolour paintings. Born in 1775 Turner was considered the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivaling history painting. He is one of the greatest masters of British watercolour landscape painting.
He is commonly known as "the painter of light" and his work regarded as a romantic preface to impressionism. Turner paint the essential character of things tries to convey it by any means whatever, without bothering about technique. His choice of subject and use of right colour and shade gives value to his work. The subject matter of Turner is the world that the artist actually lives in - the scenes, people and landscapes he knows. The direct virtual stimulus, which these scenes offer him are to be translated onto the canvas with a little modification as possible. The suitable subjects for Turner's imagination were shipwrecks, fires natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog.
He has transcribed all these natural phenomena in a series of watercolour sketches and paintings for example 'The Burning of Parliament'. He was also fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in 'Dawn after the Wreck' (1840) and 'The Slave Ship' (1840).
Turner develops a unique style of using more brilliant colours and the use of a pure white background. Watercolour is more important medium to Turner than oil paints. But with time these two media assumed a closer relationship on his canvases. Turner use oil paint as watercolour in varying degrees of transparency over light grounds.
Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. The young Turner while staying with his maternal uncle, Joseph Mallord William Marshall, in Brentford in 1785, then a small town west of London on the banks of the River Thames, develope an interest in painting. He had created many drawings, which his father exhibited in his shop window.
When he was only 14 years old, he joined the Royal Academy of Art schools in 1789. A watercolour by Turner was accepted for the a Summer exhibition of 1790 after only one year's study. He exhibited his first oil painting in 1796, 'Fishermen at Sea', and thereafter exhibited at the academy nearly every year for the rest of his life. He died on 19 December 1851 in Chelsea. His last exhibition at the Royal Academy was in 1850. Turner still recognised as an artistic genius, an English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature."
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