J. M. W. Turner is the fullest, richest, most flamboyant figure in the history of English art. Prodigal in his work as in his life, he nevertheless accumulated more money than any other artist in history and left one of the largest personal collections of paintings, prints, and drawings the world has ever seen. The fabulous energy and drive of this man produced a fortune of about a half-million pounds (in present day values) , two hundred finished paintings, about twenty thousand sketches, and innumerable etchings.

The son of a London barber in Maiden Lane, Turner spent most of his life overcoming his background. He consciously set himself up as a rival of the old masters, equaling them in some cases, exceeding them in others. Although he painted many different types of pictures, his great contribution lies in the atmospheric landscape typical of the English and in an altogether personal landscape that differentiates him from all other painters.

The family barber shop was near an art academy and at the age of five Turner was already drawing. Later he wandered about the docks, stealing aboard ships and storing up impressions. By his early teens he was professionally coloring other artists' engravings and architectural sketches. At eighteen he had his own studio and soon afterward went on a walking tour with Thomas Girtin, making drawings along the way and selling them. He had already been exhibiting at the Royal Academy for three years.

From about 1800, Turner began to imitate and-challenge the masters of the seventeenth century: the Dutch sea painters, the French and other classical landscape artists with their picturesque ruins. In 1802 at the age of twenty seven he was made a member of the Royal Academy. Now he took his first Continental tour, sailing up and down the coasts of Europe in coal and fishing boats. Turner's purpose in these tours was not to visit art galleries and ancient buildings but rather to store up impressions. Once, the story goes, he had himself lashed to the mast during a storm for four hours so he could see what was happening. Throughout, the main element of his interest was atmospheric light. This element may be used purely to describe a scene; it may give either a gentle or powerful emotive reaction; or it may serve a symbolic and essentially modern purpose.

On the more descriptive side, the Venice: Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore follows Constable in the portrayal of sunlight and the exploitation of reflections and movements. It also shows the increasing tendency toward color brightness that began with Constable. But the latter relied on various spotting techniques, whereas Turner's method is quite different. Here, for example, the paint is handled in a continuous soft surface manner, leading from one area to another without revealing just how the artist accomplished this. A visual impression and physical feeling of a sun-drenched scene has been achieved. The light is so powerful that it literally swamps every element in the picture. Thus the Dogana (customs house) and the church of San Giorgio at the right are so brightly colored that they tend to disappear in the intense light—as actually happens in real life. Similarly the various objects on the canal have reduced clarity for the same reason. The canal itself is no longer water but a series of reflections from these objects and from the sweeping sky that seems to continue down into the water. Nature and man are combined by the all consuming power of the sun into a forceful, vividly glowing whole. .

To the Impressionists of the later nineteenth century; Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir, the work of Turner is important for its atmospheric quality. Together with Constable they hailed him as a predecessor and patron saint. But unlike them, Turner is a product of the Romantic era; he is just as concerned with the power and majesty of natural forces as with their atmospheric possibilities. In Rain, Steam and Speed (below), he produces something altogether unique artistically, but entirely in keeping with the period. In these paintings he has devised a means of representing forces that have no actual form, such as the storm, the violence of the sea, rain, or steam and speed. This is a far more dynamic conception than anything in the entire range of English landscape painting, which had progressed from the idylls of Gainsborough through the atmospheric pictures of Constable to this new abstract and violent conception of nature.

The Rain, Steam and Speed shows a train rushing across a bridge, the thick fog swirling about it, the red glow of its furnace standing out against the enveloping -mist. In such portrayals form is of little importance in the attempt to get at the inner meaning of an idea. Here, or in the Whale Ship, which expresses the essence of struggle with its bloodied waters, Turner is closer to twentieth-century Expressionists like Kokoschka than to the atmospheric-minded Impressionists of the nineteenth century.