London-born Joseph Mallord William Turner was the most versatile, successful, and controversial landscape painter of nineteenth-century England. Demonstrating mastery of watercolor, oil painting, andetching, his voluminous output ranges from depictions of local topography to atmospheric renderings of fearsome storms and awe-inspiring terrain. Though profoundly influenced by landscapists and history painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Turner was an innovator who has been hailed as a forerunner of modernist abstraction.Turner profited from extensive training both within and outside of the Royal Academy (RA) Schools. He was admitted to the RA’s Plaster Academy at the age of fourteen, and to the Life Class three years later. He gained additional experience coloring prints, working as an architectural draftsman, and designing theatrical sets. In the 1790s, he participated in an informal “Academy,” where he joined with Thomas Girtin and other young men in copying from prints,watercolors, and topographical drawings at the home of the physician and alienist Dr. Thomas Monro.
London-born Joseph Mallord William Turner was the most versatile, successful, and controversial landscape painter of nineteenth-century England. Demonstrating mastery of watercolor, oil painting, andetching, his voluminous output ranges from depictions of local topography to atmospheric renderings of fearsome storms and awe-inspiring terrain. Though profoundly influenced by landscapists and history painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Turner was an innovator who has been hailed as a forerunner of modernist abstraction.Turner profited from extensive training both within and outside of the Royal Academy (RA) Schools. He was admitted to the RA’s Plaster Academy at the age of fourteen, and to the Life Class three years later. He gained additional experience coloring prints, working as an architectural draftsman, and designing theatrical sets. In the 1790s, he participated in an informal “Academy,” where he joined with Thomas Girtin and other young men in copying from prints,watercolors, and topographical drawings at the home of the physician and alienist Dr. Thomas Monro.