5 Works - J. M. W. Turner: Painting Set Free

J. M. W. Turner: Painting Set Free

February 24–May 24, 2015, GETTY CENTER

Joseph Mallord William Turner – Dutch Boats in a Gale (1801)

Joseph Mallord William  Turner, RA (1775 – 19 December 1851) was an English Romanticist landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting.

Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolour landscape painting. He is commonly known as "the painter of light" and his work is regarded as a Romantic preface to Impressionism, and some of his works are cited as examples of abstract art prior to its recognition in the early 20th century. More

Joseph Mallord William Turner, “Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth” (exhibited 1842), oil on canvas, (Tate: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856) (all images courtesy Getty Museum)

Extraordinarily inventive and enduringly influential, J. M. W. Turner produced many of his most important and famous pictures after the age of sixty, in the last fifteen years of his life. Demonstrating ongoing radicalism of technique and ever-original subject matter, these works show Turner constantly challenging his contemporaries while remaining keenly aware of the market for his art. More

J.M.W. Turner, “Venice at Sunrise from the Hotel Europa, with Campanile of San Marco” (c. 1840), watercolor (Tate: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856 Photo © Tate, London 2014)

His canvases are a rough topography of thick impasto, sometimes smeared on with a palette knife. His watercolors, conversely, seem barely touched, as faint as afterimages and as immaterial as memories. Turner’s highly personal use of color extends across media. More

J.M.W. Turner, “War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet” (exhibited 1842), oil on canvas (Tate: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

J.M.W. Turner, “Whalers” (exhibited 1845), oil on canvas (Tate: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856 Photo © Tate, London 2014)