J.M.W. Turner: A Painter of His Time (and Beyond)

One Class

1:30 – 3:30

September 29

Turner is known as Britain’s greatest painter, one who changed the direction of British art. He had a wide range of subjects, and his palette and painting techniques were quite unique. Fascinated by progress, Turner was a man who drank in his own time with an unquenchable thirst and he was knowledgeable about poetry, science and technology. Turner was also a Romantic painter– he saw the sublime in nature’s grandeur and emphasized human insignificance in the face of the forces of nature. In the 1830s and 40s his work became less distinct and that development baffled the critics. Yet it is those paintings, which prefigured abstractionism, for which he is most famous.