Joseph Mallord William Turner

JMW Turner was one of the two outstanding geniuses of British painting (the other was Constable). His characteristics even fit the dictionary definition of genius: unusual capacity for imaginative creation, intellectual power, unusual energy and precocity.

He was born and brought up in Covent Garden, London, where his father was a barber and wig-maker. It was in London that he received his early training and employment, and he spent most of his life there, yet he was to develop into the most original landscape painter of the nineteenth century. By the age of fourteen he had enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools, and a few years later he was employed as a copyist, with a handful of other young artists, by a famous connoisseur and collector Dr Munro. Turner explored Britain with great zeal, and he went abroad to Venice, Switzerland, and notably to Paris where he saw the Old Masters looted by Napoleon from all over Europe.

He was short, stout, an eccentric, and latterly a recluse. He was also ambitious and outstandingly productive: sketchbooks, thousands of drawings and water-colours (nearly 20,000 in the British Museum alone) and over five hundred oil paintings survive. Almost his entire artistic life was devoted to landscape painting in all its guises; formal and informal, seascapes, city scenes, historical and architectural scenes of dazzling accuracy and fidelity to the real world. In his book Liber Studiorum , landscape is categorized as Historical, Mountainous, Marine and Architectural, not to mention Epic, Elegant and Elevated Pastoral. When dealing with real landscape (rather than imaginary) he painted what he actually saw, and never added what he knew was there but could not see.

The Temeraire was a warship of ninety-eight guns, launched in 1798 and active at the Battle of Trafalgar; but by 1838 she was outmoded, her days of employment over, and she was towed up the Thames to be broken up. Turner witnessed this event, and his painting captured the imagination of critics and public alike. It was generally thought that the picture connected the Temeraire’s last journey to the waning of British sea power, symbolized by the dying sun. The painting has an enormous variety of texture: Turner used not only conventional brushes and palette knife, but often his hands, paint rags and the ends of his brushes.

The tall ship without her sails is ghostly and mysterious, and she is shepherded up the river by a squat tug belching fiery steam from its funnel. The whole scene is bathed in the colours of the brilliant sunset reflected in the water, so that the stately warship and the tug seem to be part of the river and the sky. Shining translucent colours were Turner’s hallmark; he created extraordinarily beautiful effects with colour and light so that his subjects seem to melt almost magically into the atmosphere.