J. M. W. Turner

British Romantic landscape painter whose late work — radiant, half-dissolved storms of light and weather — anticipated Impressionism by half a century. Turner exhibited his first watercolor at the Royal Academy at fifteen and never really stopped working; he made some 30,000 paintings, sketches and watercolors. He famously had himself lashed to the mast of a ship during a snowstorm to study the violence of the sea, and bequeathed almost his entire personal collection to the British nation on the condition it be kept together — the foundation of Tate Britain's Turner holdings.