Atmospheric watercolors by Turner.

• Author: Townsend, Richard P.

Joseph Mallord William Turner is regarded by many as the greatest British artist of the 19th century and one of Western painting's monumental figures. He was born in 1775, the son of a London barber who encouraged his pursuit of painting from an early age. Possibly because of his mother's illness (she was hospitalized for insanity), Turner's outlook on life could be pessimistic. Indeed, he produced an epic poem entitled "Fallacies of Hope." He formed few deep friendships, and never was a family man.

Turner's paramount loyalty was to his art and to the Royal Academy of Arts, that vehicle of artistic endeavor in late-18th- and 19th-century Britain, where he taught and displayed his oil paintings and exhibition watercolors from 1790 to 1850, the year before his death. He assiduously studied nature firsthand, taking his paints and sketchbooks with him on trips throughout England, Scotland, and Wales. He briefly traveled for the first time to the Continent during a cessation of hostilities of the Napoleonic wars in 1802, and then in earnest after Napoleon's defeat in 1815, touring Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy. His works on canvas, painted in the studio, depended upon his numerous pencil and watercolor sketches done on site as well as on his study of the Old Masters.

While Turner's views of the natural and manmade splendors of Europe are well-known, the artist is famed for his depiction of his native country. Because of the inaccessibility of the Continent until the defeat of Napoleon, Turner continued to travel extensively at home. His watercolor, "Thames Near Isleworth," showing the Thames River near Windsor Castle, is exceptional in having been painted outdoors. Turner kept a boat at Richmond (Windsor being just west up the Thames) that he took out on the river. Turner portrays with extraordinary freshness a sunny, warm English day through the use of broad washes, judiciously chosen areas of untouched paper, and the long shadows cast by the figures on the riverbank.

In the 1820s, Turner continued to labor on printmaking projects -- his engraved series -- which comprise some of his most important work in watercolor. These finished pieces then were translated into engraved illustrations for popular travel books or literary volumes. "Totnes, on the River Dart," painted for the series "Rivers of England" around 1824, depicts the 13th-century town in Devon, in the southwest of England. It shows the ruins of a Norman castle on the...