Works by J. M. W. Turner
412 works · 320 ms
J. M. W. Turner scraped highlights out of drying watercolour, usually with a thumbnail he kept sharp for it, and in oil he let fire, haze and moonlight blur the boats and buildings caught in them.
His father, a London barber, hung the boy's drawings in the shop window; Turner entered the Royal Academy Schools at 14 and was an Academician at 27. He set out to rival older masters, above all Claude Lorrain. Lake Avernus gives Aeneas and the Sibyl a Claude setting of tall pines, ruins and a still lake in a ring of hills, and Dort, or Dordrecht reworks a painting by Aelbert Cuyp: a packet boat crowded with passengers lies becalmed on glassy water under a pale gold sky. His mezzotint series, the Liber Studiorum, sorted landscape into six kinds; in Lake of Thun, printed in brown ink, lightning forks over the peaks while men unload a cart on the shore.
Later the forms dissolve. He painted The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons after the October 1834 fire, with the flames taller than they were; bridge, crowd and river are half lost in orange glare. Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight shows the port of Newcastle at night, men loading coal by firelight on the right while the moon opens a pale tunnel in the clouds: a Claude composition with furnaces where Claude put ancient buildings. Of a snowstorm picture of 1842 The Athenaeum wrote that, having painted before with cream, chocolate, egg yolk or currant jelly, he now used his whole kitchen. Most works below are landscapes, river views and seascapes, in oil, prints and drawings.
Sources: Wikipedia, Yale Center for British Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art.
