J. M. W. Turner

Ruskin however extolled him as true to the moods of nature. Though personally reclusive, Turner was never shy of publicity and embarked on a printmaking venture, the Liber Studiorum, to disseminate his work more widely.

Ruskin wrote a delightful account of Turner’s boyhood exploring the wharfs and banks of the Thames and Turner was proud of Britain’s maritime supremacy. In one of his first masterpieces, the so-called Bridgewater Sea Piece (1801) he pays homage to the art of a former maritime power, the Dutch of the seventeenth century, notably to the marine painter Willem van de Velde (1633–1707) who also worked in England. By 1810, in the Wreck of a Transport his style had become broader with emphasis on the perils of the sea in the vortex like composition. In Hannibal crossing the Alps (1812) the terrifying powers of nature are even more dramatically expressed and this for Turner was to be an ongoing theme.

Turner’s respect for his predecessors in landscape is clear in works such as his Crossing the Brook, a homage to the classical landscapes of Claude (1600–82), and in his later Dido building Carthage he soups up the steep perspective of Claude’s seaports. Many of his subsequent pictures evoke the gilded romance of Italy and for an aficionado of blazing suns and mists Venice was an obvious port of call. Among the most celebrated works of his later years are the nostalgic Fighting Temeraire, a depiction of a superannuated man of war being towed to the breakers, the Slave Ship in which an atrocity at sea takes second place to the drama of light and water, and Rain Steam and Speed where the driving force of steam locomotion, fire vaporizing water, is sublimated by the sun dissipating the mist.

Turner was a consummate watercolorist. Usually he bows to the market demand for adequate topographical description, but others are minimalist, strips of multicolored sea under multicolored sunsets. In very late works like Norham Castle at Sunrise all detail is suppressed in the haze, for which Turner has been hailed as a forerunner of Abstract Expressionism.