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J M W Turner is widely regarded as the greatest artist Britain has ever produced. Great Artists with Tim Marlow s1e13: J M W Turner, Sky Arts 2013
He took landscape painting into new territories, using paint in magical ways which capture the wildness of the natural world around him but border on distraction. ibid.
Fishermen at Sea was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1796. Turner had only just started using oils three years before so it’s a remarkably accomplished work. ibid.
And Turner was awestruck. Most significantly by the works of Claude Lorrain, the great seventeenth-century French landscape painter, who was to inspire him throughout his life. ibid.
Although Italy became a major source of inspiration throughout the rest of his life, images of Britain continued to dominate Turner’s canvasses. He became a chronicler of contemporary history in 1834 when he produced stunning images of the burning of the Houses of Parliament. ibid.
Rain, Steam, Speed – The Great Western Railway completed by Turner somewhere around 1843, 1844. ibid.
But then watercolour in the hands of the right artists started to produce something that could rival oil painting. In particular these two works: serene, sublime, so delicate and fragile that they are rarely shown together ... Turner’s Blue Rigi and [Thomas] Girtin’s The White House at Chelsea. Tim Marlow on ... Watercolour, 2011
It’s called the Blue Rigi, Sunrise and was painted in 1842 and was one of a series of works that Turner made around the giant Swiss mountain peak. ibid.
The sense of immersion and liquidity, the frozen gesture. The idea of recognising something that dissolves into abstraction or the other way round. These are known as Turner’s beginnings – radical experiments in part of the process that moves from sketch to the finished watercolour. ibid.
Pretty much without doubt the most illustrious British artist associated with Reynolds’s Royal Academy was Turner. And although the Courtauld don’t have any oil paintings by Turner, the do have a collection of water colours. Tim Marlow at the Courtauld 2/3
Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway 1844: It’s a wonderful picture; it’s full of energy and dynamism. Tim Marlow Meets Nitin Sahney, Tim
It inspired a hugely significant movement and a generation who were working in France. ibid.
Sunrise, with a Boat between Headlands ... The pinnacle of much of British art. Tim Marlow Meets Michael Palin, Tim
He was a man of extraordinary vision, light years ahead of his time, who pursued a quest to capture the immense power of nature in his art … Turner’s vision has become one that’s captured our own. Tim Marlow, Turner: The Man Who Painted Britain, BBC 2021
Covent Garden: He was the son of a barber. His father’s shop was always busy with travelling salesmen, city gents and colourful characters from the nearby theatres. ibid.
‘My mother had an unquenchable storm inside her; I suppose it became mine too.’ ibid. Turner
In 1789 Turner was admitted into the Royal Academy school at the age of 14. ibid.
By travelling and drawing and sketching, Turner became a prototype tourist who helped to build up a picture of Britain, and who helped forge a national identity. ibid.
Rain, Steam & Speed was Turner’s emphatic response to the new world. ibid.
English painting also produced two men of genius: Turner and Constable. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 11/13: The Worship of Nature, BBC 1969
Turner – he was a genius of the first order; far the greatest painter that England has ever produced. ibid.
Joseph Mallord William Turner who was to take British landscape to its highest efforts would have loved to have travelled to Italy ... The young Turner frequently imitated the style of other artists as a way of improving his own technique. This Green and Pleasant Land: The Story of British Landscape Painting, BBC 2011
The pursuit of ever more dramatic light effects was another feature of picturesque landscapes. In this Turner excelled. He was an avid recorder of sunrise and sunset always looking for a sense of shock and awe in natural phenomena. ibid.
1819 was Turner’s year. He finally made his much-postponed journey to Italy. And the pictures he makes on this trip are the foundation of his reputation. ibid.
In the early years of the nineteenth century Britain suddenly found herself with two powerful but contrasting visions of her landscape. The paintings of John Constable and William Turner were the stars of the Royal Academy shows. But they were as different in temperament as they were in artistic technique. ibid.
Joseph Mallord William Turner … Turner was the … first modern artist. Helen Rosslyn, Bought with Love: The Secret History of British Art Collections II: The Golden Age, BBC 2017
Turner wanted to paint that England too. For this was the early 1800s – the rockiest years in all modern British history. The time when the distance between the fantasy Britain and the reality was at its widest. The kingdom was supposed to be a model of political and social stability, but there was massive unemployment, hunger and anger ... There are hard times. Radical times. Simon Sharma’s Power of Art: Turner, BBC 2006
There is another painting in the 1840 show about which the critics are also absolutely unanimous: in dismay and scorn. J M W Turner’s Slave Ship ... The greatest British painting of the nineteenth century. ibid.
He is after all the National Gallery’s all-time favourite. ibid.
The cockney poet. ibid.
With a dab of his brush he could wave fairy dust on the genteel British countryside. ibid.
He buys a West End house for his pictures, himself and his old dad. ibid.
Frosty Morning, 1813: Two men digging a ditch, or is it a grave? You can feel the tough work of it. That hard frozen soil. Everything impassive, unsentimental, dour. How things really are. When did Constable ever do winter in the north? ibid.
It’s not just what he paints that gets him into trouble with high-class critics, it’s the way that he paints it. ibid.
Venice: for twenty years off and on Turner made the floating city his soul mate. Turner was spellbound, and conjured from a wisp here or a daub there the gauzy radiance of the place. ibid.
He [Turner] looked at Venice and saw death. ibid.
Death on a Pale Horse, 1825-1830: But Turner paints his way out of the nightmare. Look closely: the skeleton is limp; Death is dead. Turner lives to paint on. ibid.
The Fighting Temeraire, 1838: The painting he calls his Old Darling ... A nation in upheaval as the industrial revolution gathers momentum. And Turner has perfect pitch for a British public torn between affection for the past and anticipation for the future. It’s so emotionally versatile this picture ... This could be the sunset of Nelson’s England ... This is the sun rise of your new industrial revolution. ibid.
Turner’s approach to this appalling tragedy was ... to summon an apocalypse, a typhoon. The Slave Ship pitches us into the midst of a fevering dream of catastrophe, terror, sin and retribution. ibid.
This is a day of martyrdom, retribution and judgment ... Slavery would be defeated. There is after all a patch of clearing blue at the right hand top of the painting. The critics went to town. Turner became the butt of jokes. ibid.
And then there’s that other genius – Turner. His mature landscapes are very different and far more complex in their scope and subject matter. Sir Roy Strong, The Genius of British Art, Channel 4 2010
Turner lived by the Thames all his life. He was born in Maiden Lane just off the Strand in 1775 and as a child he wandered beside the barges and sailboats a hundred yards from his door. He died by the river in the Bankside residence of Chelsea. By the banks of the Thames he began his art. And by the banks of the Thames he finished his life. He loved the river. Peter Ackroyd’s Thames 2/4, ITV 2008