Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851)

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About the artist

Joseph Mallord William Turner is widely considered the greatest landscapist that Britain has produced. Too progressive for many tastes during his own lifetime, he exerted considerable influence upon artists later in the nineteenth century. Among them were the American painters of the Hudson River school. They responded powerfully to Turner's elemental handling of extremes of nature.

The French Impressionists emulated his ability to use paint to describe fleeting, evanescent effects of nature. Later, the European Symbolists admired the poetic, visionary quality of his landscapes and the way he infused them with a range of metaphysical meanings.