Age of Revolution
J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851)
British Romanticism painter.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, the son of a London barber, entered the Royal Academy Schools at fourteen and became its youngest full Academician at twenty-six. A prodigy in watercolour and topography, he built a reputation on grand landscapes and marines in the tradition of Claude Lorrain before pushing far beyond it. He travelled ceaselessly, sketching the Alps, Venice, and the coasts of Britain, and hoarded thousands of studies against the day he would leave them to the nation.
As he aged, Turner's paintings dissolved solid form into pure light, colour, and atmosphere: steam, storm, spray, and sun became his real subjects. Contemporaries were baffled or dazzled — some dismissed the late works as 'pictures of nothing' — but the critic John Ruskin devoted the first volume of 'Modern Painters' (1843) to defending Turner as the truest painter of nature who had ever lived. On exhibition 'varnishing days' Turner would famously finish canvases on the gallery wall in a public display of bravura.
Turner recorded the arrival of the industrial age — the steam tug, the railway — with a mixture of wonder and elegy, and often exhibited pictures beside verses from his own unfinished poem 'The Fallacies of Hope'. His late dissolution of the visible world made him a hero to the Impressionists; Monet and Pissarro studied his work in London in 1870-71. He died in 1851, leaving his finished paintings to the British nation.
The words the record keeps using: sublime, atmospheric, turbulent, luminous, elegiac, visionary, restless.
At a glance
- Lived 1775–1851
- Origin British
- Worked in London
- Era Age of Revolution
- Movements Romanticism
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Watercolor
- Techniques Impasto, Alla prima (wet-in-wet), Atmospheric perspective
Works in the archive
- The Fighting Temeraire, 1839 (National Gallery, London)
The ghostly white hulk of a great warship from Trafalgar is towed by a squat, fiery little steam tug to be broken up for scrap, beneath a blazing sunset. An elegy for the age of sail giving way to the age of steam —… - The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying), 1840 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
A slave ship flees an oncoming typhoon, having thrown its enslaved dead and dying overboard; shackled limbs and feeding fish churn in the blood-red sea of the foreground. Turner exhibited it with verses from his poem… - Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, 1842 (Tate, London)
A steamboat is engulfed in a blizzard at sea, barely visible in a whirling vortex of snow, spray, and smoke. Turner presents nature at its most overwhelming — the very type of the Romantic sublime, where the human… - Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844 (National Gallery, London)
A black locomotive of the Great Western Railway hurtles across a bridge out of a veil of rain and steam, straight toward the viewer. Turner makes the newest force in the world — mechanical speed — into a phenomenon of…
What was said
Turner exhibited the 'Slave Ship' with lines from his own unfinished poem 'The Fallacies of Hope', invoking an approaching typhoon over a ship that has thrown its slaves overboard, and asking where its hope now lay.
In the first volume of 'Modern Painters', Ruskin defended Turner as the greatest of landscape painters, arguing that he rendered the truth of sky, water, and atmosphere more faithfully than any predecessor.
Reviewing 'Rain, Steam and Speed', Thackeray marvelled at a railway train that seemed to rush bodily out of the canvas, a dazzling feat of light and motion.
Lineage
Learned from Thomas Moran, Claude Lorrain
Passed on to Claude Monet
What would J.M.W. make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after J.M.W. Turner", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with J.M.W. · Keep a life moment the way J.M.W. would · Pictures made after J.M.W.