English Romantic Painter, 1775-1851 Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775 ?C 19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style is said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Although Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, he is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. According to David Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." (Piper 321) Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires (such as the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner rushed to witness first-hand, and which he transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn after the Wreck (1840) and The Slave Ship (1840). Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God - a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena. Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway painted (1844).His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape. However, in Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects. (Piper 321) One popular story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality, states that he even had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea. In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.  Related Paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner :. | Fishermen at Sea (The Cholmeley Sea Piece) | Slave ship | Warship | Expression | Naufragio |
Related Artists:
Richard Wilson
Welsh Romantic Painter, ca.1713-1782 was a Welsh landscape painter, and one of the founder members of the Royal Academy in 1768. Wilson has been described as '...the most distinguished painter Wales has ever produced and the first to appreciate the aesthetic possibilities of his country.' Wilson is considered to be the father of landscape painting in Britain. The son of a clergyman, Wilson was born in Penegoes, Montgomeryshire. The family was an old and respected one, and Wilson was first cousin to Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden. In 1729 he went to London where he began as a portrait painter, under the apprentership of an obscure artist, Thomas Wright. From 1750 to 1757 he was in Italy and adopted landscape on the advice of Francesco Zuccarelli. Painting in Italy and afterwards in England, he was the first major British painter to primarily concentrate on landscape. He composed well, but saw and rendered only the general effects of nature thereby creating a personal, ideal style influenced by Claude Lorrain and the Dutch landscape tradition. According to John Ruskin, he "paints in a manly way, and occasionally reaches exquisite tones of colour." He concentrated on painting Italianate landscapes and landscapes based upon classsical literature, but when his painting The Destruction of the Children of Niobe (c.1759-60) won high acclaim he gained many commissions from wealthy families seeking classical potrayals of their estates.
Louis Gauffier
1762-1801 French Louis Gauffier Gallery French painter. Following his move to Paris, where he became a pupil of Hugues Taraval and a student at the Academie Royale, in 1784 Gauffier shared the Prix de Rome with Jean-Germain Drouais and Antoine-Denis Chaudet (for sculpture), his own work being Christ and the Woman of Canaan (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.). During his time in Rome (1785-9) Gauffier worked hard, but his health was poor and the results variable. On his return to Paris he was accepted (agree) by the Academie as a history painter. Soon after, he returned to Rome in order to escape the worsening situation in Revolutionary Paris, although he continued to send his Neo-classical works to the Salon. In March 1790 he married Pauline Chatillon (d July 1801), a portrait painter whom he and Drouais had taught..
Theodore Wores
American Painter, ca.1859-1939,was an American painter born in San Francisco. Wores began his art training at age twelve in the studio of Joseph Harrington, who taught him color, composition, drawing and perspective. When the San Francisco School of Design opened in 1874, Wores was one of the first pupils to enroll. After one year at that school under the landscape painter Virgil Macey Williams, he continued his art education at the Royal Academy in Munich where he spent six years. He also painted with William Merritt Chase and Frank Duveneck. Wores returned to San Francisco in 1881. He went to Japan for two extended visits and had successful exhibitions of his Japanese paintings in New York and London, where he became friends with James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde. He visited Hawaii and Samoa in 1901-1902 and established a home in San Francisco about 1906. He visited Hawaii for a second time in 1910?C1911. For the remainder of his career, Wores painted the coast on the western edge of San Francisco. He died in San Francisco in 1939. His most famous work is The Lei Maker, which is on permanent display at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.