Covent Garden, London, United Kingdom

Covent Garden

cholera

St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, United Kingdom

lathe

Turner painted this self-portrait in around 1799 when he was 24 years old. He possibly intended to mark his election as an Associate of the Royal Academy. This was an important moment in his career. It meant he could exhibit his works in the Academy without fear of rejection by any members of the committee.

In his early works he used both organic pigments and mineral pigments including ochres, but he began using industrial products soon after they were introduced: cobalt blue appears in his works by 1810, chrome yellow by 1815, and emerald green from the 1830s.

After his father’s death Turner used only commercial made canvases (oil medium with lead white and chalk and with a layer of size in the middle).

Turner turned to oil colours in his early twenties to gain more professional standing and recognition, and exhibited his first oil painting, Fishermen at Sea, at the Royal Academy when he was 21. There is evidence in the 1800 painting Dolbadern Castle that he used the lead pigment Naples yellow.

In the image above, ‘Venice:The Interior of San Marco:the Atrium Looking North’, Turner has used buff paper to make a very quick and incredibly modern looking sketch. The work is more a drawing, never intended to be considered a finished painting.

Turner painted some areas of Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight more thickly than others, such as the silvery white moon and the yellow-orange torchlights. In this technique of applying paint thickly to a canvas, called impasto, the artwork often retains the mark of the brush or palette knife.

Turner often used a palette knife to thickly apply paint, but he also smeared paint on his canvases with his fingers or rags. The impasto technique, which he employed, provided his paintings with a textural quality that complimented his expressionist style.

Romanticism

The sky has been seen as a dream, a nightmare, heaven and hell, a gentle light and a violent storm; William Turner painted it in every one of its forms, through different media, oils, graphite and watercolours, in landscapes paintings and behind everyday scenes.

In 1815 there was a massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia, which led to spectacular sunsets in Europe that were captured by painters including Turner. The aerosol particles scattered sunlight and produced bright red and orange sunsets in Europe for up to three years after the eruption.

English painter, one of the greatest figures in the history of landscape painting. His family called him Bill or William, but he is now invariably known as J. M. W. Turner (which is how he usually signed his pictures).