J. M. W. Turner

The greatest British painter in the tradition of landscape, and the artist whose late work — dissolving storms of light, weather and elemental force that barely contain recognizable imagery — anticipated the achievements of Monet and the Impressionists by fifty years. Turner was a prodigy: born in London, the son of a barber, he exhibited his first watercolor at the Royal Academy at the age of fifteen and was elected a full Academician at twenty-seven, the youngest in the institution's history. He made more than 30,000 paintings, sketches, and watercolors across a working life of more than sixty years. His ambition was to be the greatest landscape painter in European history — a direct challenge to Claude Lorrain, whose canvases he revered and studied, and whom he requested to be buried beside. The early work is meticulous and atmospheric in a way that the Academy recognized and rewarded; the middle period adds an increasingly dramatic use of light and weather to theatrical historical and marine subjects. The late work — Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), The Slave Ship (1840), Snowstorm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842) — is almost abstract in its submission of form to atmosphere. He reportedly had himself lashed to a mast to study a snowstorm at sea, though the story may be apocryphal. He left his entire personal collection — nearly three hundred oils and nearly thirty thousand works on paper — to the British nation, on condition that it be kept together and shown free of charge. After decades of dispute over the terms of the bequest, the bulk of the bequest is now held at Tate Britain, which devotes a wing to his work. Ruskin, his greatest champion, devoted the first two volumes of Modern Painters (1843) to his defence; the Impressionists, when they came to London in the Franco-Prussian War, discovered in him a precursor they had not expected.