Turner, J(oseph) M(allord) W(illiam) 1775-1851
English painter, one of the great masters of landscape art and of watercolour

Turner was born in London. At the age of 14 he entered the Royal Academy and in the following year he was already exhibiting. At 18 he began touring England and Wales in search of material and made architectural drawings in the cathedral cities. For three years in the mid-1790s he joined forces with Thomas Girtin, the latter drawing the outlines and Turner washing in the colour; between them they raised the art of watercolour to new heights of delicacy and charm.

From 1796, strongly influenced by Richard Wilson and Claude, he took up oils. In 1802 he visited the Louvre collections, now enriched by Napoleon I's booty, and was greatly attracted by Titian and Nicolas Poussin. More and more he became preoccupied with the delicate rendering of shifting gradations of light on such diverse forms as waves, shipwrecks, fantastic architecture and towering mountain ranges, conveying a generalized mood or impression of a scene, sometimes accentuated by a theatrically arbitrary choice of vivid colour. Examples of his work from this period are The Shipwreck (1805), Frosty Morning (1813) and Crossing the Brook (1815). He also worked on engravings, the series Liber Studiorum (1807-19), which remained uncompleted and failed because he underpaid the engravers.

He visited Italy several times between 1819 and 1840; and there he completed the famous pictures of Venice, The Fighting T�m�raire (1839) and Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), both in the National Gallery, London.

Turner led a secretive private life; he never married and when not staying with his patron Lord Egremont at Petworth, he lived in London taverns. He died in a temporary lodging at Chelsea under the assumed name of Booth. He bequeathed 300 of his paintings and 20,000 watercolours and drawings to the nation. Turner's revolution in art foreshadowed Impressionism and found a timely champion in John Ruskin, whose Modern Painters (vol 1, 1843) helped to turn the critical tide in Turner's favour.

Bibliography: M Butlin and E Joll, The Paintings of J M W Turner (revised edn, 2 vols, 1984).