Painter of Light: 250 Years of William Turner

His portrait adorns the 20-pound note. Britain's most important prize for modern art also bears his name – Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851). This is no coincidence: Brilliant sunsets, dark towering clouds, foaming sea spray – Turner mastered the play of light, color, and atmosphere like few others. He found inspiration for his paintings primarily on forays into nature and while traveling.

Over the course of his life, Turner traveled not only within Great Britain, but also to the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, and Germany. There, he was fascinated by the mighty Rhine. The landscapes he created there subsequently awakened the British wanderlust and made the Rhineland a popular travel destination. Today, Turner is considered one of the fathers of Rhine Romanticism .

But Venice had a particularly strong influence on him. He visited the lagoon city in northern Italy three times: in 1819, 1833, and 1840. Turner's views of Venice reveal his stylistic development: his paintings became increasingly blurred, mystical, and flooded with light. Turner used light to create atmosphere like no other artist. The boundaries between land and water blurred. It's not for nothing that these depictions are also called fairy paintings or fairytale paintings. Turner seems to have captured the spirit of the times, as his paintings enjoyed enormous popularity.

"Light is therefore color," Turner described the importance of light in a lecture as early as 1818. It is even said that Turner had studio visitors wait in the dark before visiting his exhibition so that they could more consciously perceive the lighting effects in his paintings.

Who was William Turner?

Born on April 23, 1775, in London, Turner grew up during the Industrial Revolution , a time of major economic and social upheaval. At the age of twelve, he made his first landscape sketches. His father, a barber and wigmaker by trade, recognized his talent and exhibited his son's paintings for sale in his shop. This, in part, contributed to Turner's artistic career quickly gaining momentum. At just 14, he enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy in London, where he initially painted primarily watercolors. Later, he taught there as a professor of perspective.

Historical pictures of a different kind

However, Turner's paintings didn't simply depict nature. Instead, he also incorporated contemporary events into his works and, unusually for the Romantic era, also painted technological achievements such as locomotives and steamships battling the forces of nature.

Historical and mythical events also found their place in his paintings - albeit in an unusual setting.

Turner's later work became increasingly idiosyncratic, thus meeting with much incomprehension. In 1942, the Royal Academy exhibited the painting "Blizzard"—now one of his most famous works. It depicts a steamship battling the elements, or, as contemporary critics put it, "to our eyes, it is a mass of swirling soap suds."

This almost abstract style, for which Turner was criticized at the time, inspired later Impressionists such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissaro. Today, Turner is considered the father of Impressionism, an idiosyncratic pioneer of modernism, and some even a forerunner of abstract art. In any case, he was far ahead of his time.