English Romantic Painter, 1775-1851 Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775 ?C 19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style is said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Although Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, he is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. According to David Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." (Piper 321) Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires (such as the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner rushed to witness first-hand, and which he transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn after the Wreck (1840) and The Slave Ship (1840). Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God - a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena. Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway painted (1844).His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape. However, in Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects. (Piper 321) One popular story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality, states that he even had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea. In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.  Related Paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner :. | The town | Canal | The Righting (Temeraire),tugged to her last berth to be broken up (mk31) | The Passage of the St.Gothard | Rain,Steam and Speed-The Great Western Railway (mk31) |
Related Artists:
Heywood Hardy
British 1843-1933
Charles-Francois Daubigny
French Barbizon School Painter, 1817-1878 was one of the painters of the Barbizon school, and is considered an important precursor of Impressionism. Daubigny was born into a family of painters and was taught the art by his father Edmond François Daubigny and his uncle, miniaturist Pierre Daubigny. Initially Daubigny painted in a traditional style, but this changed after 1843 when he settled in Barbizon to work outside in nature. Even more important was his meeting with Camille Corot in 1852 in Optevoz (Is??re). On his famous boat Botin, which he had turned into a studio, he painted along the Seine and Oise, often in the region around Auvers. From 1852 onward he came under the influence of Gustave Courbet. In 1866 Daubigny visited England, eventually returning because of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. In London he met Claude Monet, and together they left for the Netherlands. Back in Auvers, he met Paul Cezanne, another important impressionist.
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin
Russian Painter, 1878-1939 Russian painter. He began his studies in the drawing and painting classes of F. Burov (1843-95) in Samara (1893-5), and he attended Baron Stieglitz's school in St Petersburg from 1895 to 1897. He studied under Abram Arkhipov, Nikolay Kasatkin and Valentin Serov at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1897 to 1905 and at Anton Azb?'s school in Munich (1901). After working in various private studios in Paris between 1905 and 1908, he travelled to Constantinople (now Istanbul), Greece and Italy in 1905 and to Algiers in 1906. On his return to Russia, he held an exhibition in the editorial offices of the magazine Apollon in St Petersburg (1909). From 1911 to 1924 he exhibited with the WORLD OF ART group and from 1925 to 1928 with the FOUR ARTS SOCIETY OF ARTISTS. From the early 1910s Petrov-Vodkin's work was influential in the artistic life of St Petersburg. He attempted to reconcile classical and modern trends. His style was formed under a wide range of influences, often seemingly incompatible: 19th-century Russian painters such as Aleksey Venetsianov,