J M W Turner
Turner was born April 23, 1775 in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London. He was an English Romantic Landscape Artist, 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 rivaling history painting. He entered the Royal Academy of Arts schools in 1789, when he was only 14 years old, and was accepted into the academy a year later. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. Turner was 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." He died Dec. 19, 1851 leaving a small fortune which he hoped would be used to support what he called "decayed artists".
