The life of one of Western art's most admired and misunderstood painters J.M.W. Turner is one of the most important figures in Western art, and his visionary work paved the way for a revolution in landscape painting. Over the course of his lifetime, Turner strove to liberate painting from an antiquated system of patronage. Bringing a new level of expression and color to his canvases, he paved the way for the modern artist. Turner was very much a man of his changing era. In his lifetime, he saw Britain ravaged by Napoleonic wars, revived by the Industrial Revolution, and embarked upon a new moment of Imperial glory with the ascendancy of Queen Victoria. His own life embodied astonishing transformation. Born the son of a barber in Covent Garden, he was buried amid pomp and ceremony in St. Paul's Cathedral. Turner was accepted into the prestigious Royal Academy at the height of the French Revolution when a climate of fear dominated Britain. Unable to travel abroad he explored at home, reimagining the landscape to create some of the most iconic scenes of his country. But his work always had a profound human element. When a moment of peace allowed travel into Europe, Turner was one of the first artists to capture the beauty of the Alps, to revive Venice as a subject, and to follow in Byron’s footsteps through the Rhine country. While he was commercially successful for most of his career, Turner's personal life remained fraught. His mother suffered from mental illness and was committed to Bedlam. Turner never married but had several long-term mistresses and illegitimate daughters. His erotic drawings were numerous but were covered up by prurient Victorians after his death. Turner's late, impressionistic work was held up by his Victorian detractors as example of a creeping madness. Affection for the artist’s work soured. John Ruskin, the greatest of all 19th century art critics, did what he could to rescue Turner’s reputation, but Turner’s very last works confounded even his greatest defender. TURNER humanizes this surprising genius while placing him in his fascinating historical context. Franny Moyle brilliantly tells the story of the man to give us an astonishing portrait of the artist and a vivid evocation of Britain and Europe in flux.

J.M.W. Turner was a fascinating and enigmatic figure. Both astonishingly prolific and extraordinarily innovative, he is widely seen as the greatest British landscape painter of them all, anticipating and surpassing the Impressionists in his dramatic interpretations of the effects of light and colour. The Turner Book goes beyond the usual interpretations of the artist, revealing the extraordinary self-belief and ambition that allowed him to continue steadfastly with his experimentation in the face of hostile critical attack. The book examines in detail key works and the techniques by which Turner realised them and features revealing extracts from his notebooks, travel journals and poetry. Beautifully illustrated with both famous and unknown works and ranging over the entire course of the artist's career, this is the essential guide to Turner's life and work. Sam Smiles is Professor of Art History at the University of Plymouth at Exeter and the author of numerous acclaimed books, including J.M.W. Turner, Two-way Traffic: British Art and Italian Art 1880-1980 and The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination.

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.

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.

One of the most popular painters of all time, J.M.W. Turner created a remarkable collection of sketchbooks over the course of his career. The 'Skies' sketchbook takes its name from its many richly coloured sky studies. Most of the sketches in the book were presumably observed in England, but a few many have been seen in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. The dramatic consequence of the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815m darkening skies and reddening sunsets around the world, surely caught his attention. Turner's more intensely-coloured studies may document these effects which lasted for over a year. This edition of the sketchbook reproduces all these beautiful drawings in near-facsimile.

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).

J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History is an in-depth consideration of the artist's complex response to the challenge of creating history paintings in the early nineteenth century. Structured around the linked themes of making and unmaking, of creation and destruction, this book examines how Turner's history paintings reveal changing notions of individual and collective identity at a time when the British Empire was simultaneously developing and fragmenting. Turner similarly emerges as a conflicted subject, one whose artistic modernism emerged out of a desire to both continue and exceed his eighteenth-century aesthetic background by responding to the altered political and historical circumstances of the nineteenth century.

Extraordinarily inventive and enduringly influential, J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) produced 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. Bringing together over sixty key oil paintings and watercolors, this major international loan exhibition is the first to focus on the unfettered creativity of Turner's final years.

Meet the Artist: J. M. W. Turner is packed with inspiring activities for budding young artists. Create colorful Turneresque landscapes and seascapes, experiment with watercolors, and paint portraits of your friends and family. Starting with a brief introduction to the life of J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), an English painter known for his evocative land- and seascapes, the book offers a series of drawing-based activities that explore prominent themes and ideas in the artist's work. Featuring beautiful reproductions of actual artworks and illustrated by a leading contemporary illustrator, this book, like all titles in the Meet the Artist series, encourages children to use art as an avenue for exploring ideas and expressing their own experiences.