Joseph Mallord William Turner Painting Reproductions 1 of 14

Rain lashed the city the day Joseph Mallord William Turner was laid to rest beneath the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. The light that obsessed him, that he chased across skies and seas for over sixty years, had finally faded. A son of Covent Garden, born into the noise of London’s markets in 1775, Turner rose from humble beginnings to become the most radical landscape painter of his age - and one of the most enduring figures in the history of Western art.

Raised in modest circumstances by a barber father and a mentally troubled mother, Turner’s childhood was marked by emotional turbulence and early independence. Sent away from London to relatives in Brentford and Margate, he began to sketch the Thames and the Kentish coast. What began as a child’s distraction soon revealed itself as a prodigious gift. At 14, he entered the Royal Academy of Arts. A year later, in 1790, he exhibited for the first time. London’s art world had taken notice.

In these formative years, Turner absorbed a pragmatic education. He learned architectural draftsmanship, studied under topographical artists, and honed his skill through commissions and hand-coloured prints. Even as a teenager, he was selling watercolours from his father’s barber shop window. The precision of these early works, often studies of ruins and abbeys, reflected the prevailing tastes of the time. But behind the measured lines was a restless imagination, one that would soon push against convention.

By the late 1790s, Turner was beginning to break free. "Fishermen at Sea" (1796), his first oil painting exhibited at the Royal Academy, hinted at the power that would define his mature style: turbulent seascapes, spectral light, and a near-mystical vision of nature’s grandeur. Travel broadened his palette. In 1802 he crossed the Channel to study the Old Masters in the Louvre and to explore Switzerland. His sketchbooks - often filled obsessively - recorded not only Alpine vistas, but the changing moods of weather and light.

Turner was a solitary figure by nature, but he was not without support. He enjoyed the patronage of Walter Fawkes at Farnley Hall and George Wyndham at Petworth, where he painted some of his most atmospheric landscapes. His social eccentricities, however, deepened over time. Following the death of his father in 1829, with whom he had lived for decades, Turner grew increasingly reclusive. He never married, though he fathered two daughters with Sarah Danby, and later lived incognito with Sophia Caroline Booth in Chelsea, assuming the name "Mr Booth".

His artistic trajectory bent further toward the sublime. Paintings like "Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps" (1812) and "The Slave Ship" (1840) displayed a fierce energy: swirling compositions, radiant color, and a near-dissolution of form. Critics derided many of these late works as incoherent, but others - notably the young John Ruskin - hailed them as visionary. Indeed, Turner seemed less concerned with topographical accuracy than with capturing nature’s raw, mercurial temperament.

Turner’s technique evolved continually. He layered glazes, experimented with new pigments (some fugitive), and brought the transparency of watercolour into his oil painting. Works like "Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway" (1844) pushed toward abstraction, their subjects dissolving into mist and motion. In them, one senses an artist consumed with light - not as illumination, but as substance itself.

Though hailed in some circles, Turner remained controversial in his lifetime. He was often secretive, difficult, and protective of his methods. He opened his own gallery, lectured as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy, and created the monumental print series "Liber Studiorum" to elevate the status of landscape. Yet as he aged, he withdrew more into private obsessions, his home neglected, his public appearances sporadic.

He died in 1851 at the age of 76, succumbing to cholera in his modest Chelsea lodgings. His passing marked the end of an era, yet Turner’s influence had only just begun. He bequeathed over 30,000 works to the British nation, along with a substantial estate, although legal wrangling diluted his wishes. Many of his paintings now reside in Tate Britain’s Clore Gallery, though his desire for them to remain together was never fully realized.

Today, Joseph Mallord William Turner stands not merely as an English Romantic painter, but as a pivotal figure in the evolution of modern art. His fearless experiments with colour and form anticipated Impressionism and even abstraction. Claude Monet studied him closely. So did Mark Rothko. The fighting ships, the storms, the sunbeams breaking through fog - all these continue to pulse with energy. Turner did not simply paint landscapes. He painted vision itself.