Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in London in 1775, the son of a barber, and became the greatest landscape painter Britain has ever produced — and arguably the most radical painter in Europe before the Impressionists. A prodigy who entered the Royal Academy Schools at fourteen, he began as a topographical watercolourist but rapidly developed into a painter of extraordinary ambition, transforming landscape from a minor genre into a vehicle for the most profound meditations on nature, time, and human existence.
Turner’s early paintings — dramatic seascapes, Alpine storms, classical harbour scenes — already showed his obsession with atmospheric effect, but from the 1830s onward his art underwent a revolution. Forms dissolved into veils of colour and light; the horizon disappeared; the canvas became a field of luminous pigment in which fire, water, and air merged indistinguishably. Rain, Steam, and Speed (1844) reduces a railway train crossing a bridge to a blur of golden light and dark force, while Norham Castle, Sunrise (c. 1845) is virtually abstract, its castle barely suggested in washes of blue and gold.
The Slave Ship (1840), with its drowning figures and apocalyptic sunset, was called by Ruskin “the noblest sea ever painted.” Turner bequeathed nearly 300 oil paintings and 30,000 watercolours and drawings to the British nation, a body of work that continues to astonish with its range, ambition, and sheer visual daring. Monet and Pissarro both acknowledged their debt to him, and the Turner Prize, Britain’s most prestigious contemporary art award, bears his name.