Although many of his works provoked critical controversy during his lifetime, Joseph Mallord William Turner is now properly regarded as the greatest British landscape painter of the nineteenth century and one of the most important of all British artists. His early topographical watercolours and oil paintings of seascapes and of English scenery fall within the dominant Picturesque aesthetic of the late eighteenth century, but he determined to raise the intellectual status of landscape, building on the earlier achievements of Claude, Poussin and Richard Wilson. In pursuit of this goal he was drawn to historical, Biblical and classical subjects. But it was his elemental grasp of the effects of light, wind and fire, of the power of the sea and the helplessness of mere humanity in the face of…
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Citation: Mannings, David. "J. M. W. Turner". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 March 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4481, accessed 25 November 2024.]
