J M W Turner

The man behind the paintings: the extraordinary life of J. M. W Turner, one of Britain's most admired, misunderstood and celebrated artists J. M. W. Turner is Britain's most famous landscape painter. Yet beyond his artistic achievements, little is known of the man himself and the events of his life: the tragic committal of his mother to a lunatic asylum, the personal sacrifices he made to effect his stratospheric rise, and the bizarre double life he chose to lead in the last years of his life. A near mythical figure in his own lifetime, Franny Moyle tells the story of the man who was considered visionary at best and ludicrous at worst. A resolute adventurer, he found new ways of revealing Britain to the British, astounding his audience with his invention and intelligence. Set against the backdrop of the finest homes in Britain, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, this is an astonishing portrait of one of the most important figures in Western art 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.

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.

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.

In 1802, at the age of 26, Joseph Mallord William Turner became the youngest ever member of the Royal Academy. A prolific painter and watercolourist, his paintings began by combining great historical themes with the inspired visions of nature, but his experimentation with capturing the effects of light led him swiftly towards an unusual dissolution of forms. Turner was a constant traveller, not only within the British Isles but also throughout Europe, from the Alps to the banks of the Rhine, from northern France to Rome and Venice. His death in 1851 revealed not only his zealously guarded private life but also a will that left both his fortune and more than thirty thousand drawings, watercolours and paintings to the nation. In this profusely illustrated book, Olivier Meslay invites us to follow the development of Turner's incandescent art, a bridge between Romanticism and Impressionism and one of Britain's most remarkable contributions to art history.

Short introduction with over 100 paintings highlighting the revolutionary approach by Turner whose powerful sweeping strokes turned away from portraiture and prepared the way for Impressionism. 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).