Turner [antikvár]

J.M.W. Turner: a Landscape and Marine Painter without Equal? From darkness to light: perhaps no painter in the history of western art evolved over a greater visual span than Turner. If we compare one of his earliest exhibited masterworks, such as the fairly low-keyed St. Anselm's Chapel, with part of Thomas-á-Becket's crown, Canterbury Cathedral of I 794, with a brilliantly-keyed picture dating from the I840s, such as The Falls of the Clyde, it seems hard to credit that the two images stemmed from the same hand, so vastly do they differ in appearance. Yet this apparent disjunction can easily obscure the profound continuity that underpins Turner's art, just as the dazzling colour, high tonality and loose forms of the late images can lead to the belief that the painter shared the aims of the French Impressionists or even that he wanted to be somé kind of abstractionist, both of which are completely untrue notions. Instead, this continuity demonstrates how single-mindedly Turner pursued his early idealising goals and how magnificently he finally attained them. Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in London on 23 April 1 775, the son of a barber. In I 789 he began studying at the only art school in Britain, the Royal Academy Schools. He supplemented the plaster modelling and life drawing he was exclusively taught there by apprenticing with journeyman, topographer and architectural watercolourist, Thomas Malton Jr. (1748-1804).