
J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) transformed light itself into the subject of painting. Born in London to a barber, he entered the Royal Academy Schools at fourteen and exhibited his first oil, Fishermen at Sea, at twenty-one. By twenty-seven he was a Royal Academician, the youngest person ever elected to full membership.
Turner became the defining painter of British Romanticism, pursuing light, color, and atmosphere with revolutionary intensity. His early work showed meticulous topographical skill, but he gradually dissolved forms into swirling color and energy. He painted storms at sea, burning parliaments, trains emerging from rain. The Fighting Temeraire (1839), showing a veteran warship towed to the breakers, was voted Britain's greatest painting in a 2005 BBC poll.
Intensely private and eccentric, Turner never married but fathered two daughters. He lived in squalor in his final years, dying in Chelsea in 1851. He left 550 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolors, and 30,000 works on paper to the nation, along with £140,000 intended for impoverished artists. His relatives contested the will and got most of the money. The art went to what became the Turner Bequest. Today, most of his work fills the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain, with important pieces at the National Gallery. The prestigious Turner Prize takes his name.
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