J. M. W. Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner was an English Romantic painter working in oil and watercolour, best known for landscapes and marine scenes in which light, atmosphere and weather increasingly dominate over precise form. The son of a Covent Garden barber, he entered the Royal Academy Schools at fourteen, exhibited from his teens, and was elected a full Academician at twenty-six. He travelled widely across Britain and the Continent, filling hundreds of sketchbooks, and produced works such as The Fighting Temeraire and Rain, Steam and Speed. He guarded his privacy, lived his final years under an assumed name in Chelsea, and bequeathed much of his output to the British nation.