Short introduction with over 100 paintings highlighting the revolutionary approach by Turner whose powerful sweeping strokes turned away from portraiture and prepared the way for Impressionism. The English Romantic painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775–19 December 1851) was a brilliant landscape artist, a watercolourist and printmaker. His style, powerful and fierce, melding the elements with humankind are thought by many to have prepared the way for Impressionism. In his time he was controversial, but his focus on land and seascapes widened the palette of artists and their audience, and his impressionistic brushwork prepared the way for the fragmentation of the modern era. This wonderful new book brings to life his greatest achievements, with such paintings as The Fighting 'Temeraire’, Inside Tintern Abbey and Rain, Steam and Speed (The Great Western Railway).

Catalog if an exhibition held at the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Okla., Feb. 28-April 12, 1998.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Britain's greatest and most mysterious artist, was the son of a Convent Garden barber and a woman who died in Bethlehem mental hospital. During his lifetime (1775-1851), Turner achieved fame and fortune for a range of work encompassing seascape and landscape, immensely powerful oil paintings and intimate watercolors. His friend and colleague C. R. Leslie remembered him thus: "Turner was short and stout, and had a sturdy, sailor-like walk. He might be taken for the captain of a steamboat at first glance; but a second would find more in his face than belongs in any ordinary mind. There was the peculiar keenness of expression in his eye that is only seen in men of constant habits of observation." For this new biography, the first comprehensive narrative of Turner's life in a generation, Anthony Bailey has searched through the archives, studied the scholarly literature, made use of much research done in the last thirty years, and looked at almost all of Turner's sketchbooks as well as many of his paintings and watercolors. He has uncovered fresh material and put together other facts, previously known, to shed new light on those complicated and secretive man. Anthony Bailey has set out to write a biography of the man, not a book about his paintings, and J.M.W. Turner comes vividly to life in theses pages. Both reclusive and gregarious, private and vainglorious, tough and vulnerable, a long-tern bachelor who fathered two daughters, Turner was full of contradictions, and Anthony Bailey rises masterfully to the challenge of describing them here.

JMW Turner is one of the greatest artists Britain has ever produced. His watercolours, with their extraordinary effects of shifting light and dramatic skyscapes, are especially highly regarded. For the first time, the secrets of Turner's technique are revealed, allowing present-day watercolourists to learn from his achievements.This book combines unrivalled knowledge of Turner's working methods from Tate curators and conservators with practical advice from some of the world's most respected watercolour experts. Twenty-two thematic exercises are illustrated with Turner's works. Expert contemporary watercolourists explain, step-by-step, how to paint a similar composition, learning from Turner's techniques. Packed with invaluable information, from the materials Turner used to achieve the masterpieces we know and love today, to the modern materials the twenty-first-century watercolour artist will need.Backed by the authority of Tate, the world centre for Turner scholarship, with a glossary of technical terms, this is an invaluable resource both for lovers of Turner's art and of watercolour painting.

William Turner (1775-1851) was simultaneously a romantic and a realist--and yet he transcended both styles. This book opens up Turner's paintings, demonstrating that he was not simply illustrating nature, but that his pictures speak directly to the eye as nature does itself.