William Turner

April 23 1775 (London) - December 19 1851 (London). English painter who dominated British landscape painting throughout the first half of the 19th century.

Turner began his career with topographical drawings of buildings and and town vistas. In 1796, he turned to oil painting and quickly established a reputation at the Royal Academy of Arts as a painter of sublime and historical landscapes.

In the beginning, he was influenced by Richard Wilson, whereas from 1800 on he turned to Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Dughet, Nicolas Poussin and Dutch painters of the sea. His landscapes and sea pictures were often elevated to romanticism by mythological figures and dramatic motifs. In 1802 he visited France and Switzerland, in 1817 Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, in 1819 Italy for the first time. From there on he began moving away from figurative representations to the depictions of the effects of light and air. His late paintings are thus pictorial visions whose forms are lost in floods of light and dazzling vivid colours.

Turner had rather radical views as regards politics and being fearful and melancholic, Turner was easily convinced that England stood on the brink of an abyss, as by 1806, Napoleon had conquered Europe and now threatened Britain. Turner’s paintings from this era (such as Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps) express his own notion of crisis symbolically. Later, after Queen Victoria began her long reign, Turner’s revolutionary spirit faded. His pictures became more cheerful and gained beauty, being less influenced by his fear of catastrophes.

Turner’s ambition always was to confirm the status of landscape as a serious art form. His exploration of the effects of light in the pursuit of new demonstrations of sublimity has led to his purposes being confounded with that of the Impressionists, whereas Turner saw himself in a direct line from 17th-century classicists like Poussin. Most of his paintings are exhibited in London’s National Gallery and the Tate Britain.

Bibliography:

Walker, John. Joseph Mallord William Turner. Cologne: DuMont, 1989.

Brockhaus Enzyklopädie. Wiesbaden: F.A. Brockhaus, 1974.

Turner, Jane.ed. The Dictionary of Art. New York: Grove’s Dictionaries, 1996.