J. M. W. Turner (English, 1775-1851), The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834, detail, 1835, Oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The John Howard McFadden Collection, 1928.

J.M.W. Turner, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus - Homer's Odyssey, 1829, Oil on canvas, 132.5 x 203 cm, National Gallery, London.

J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm – Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps, 1810-1812, Oil on canvas, 144,7 x 236 cm, Tate.

J.M.W. Turner, The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805, 1822-24, Oil on canvas, 261.5 x 368.5 cm, © National Maritime Museum, London, Greenwich Hospital Collection.

J.M.W. Turner, Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, 1835, Oil on canvas, 92.3 x 122.8 cm, Widener Collection. © National Gallery of Art Washington, D.C.

J.M.W. Turner, Fishermen at Sea, 1796, oil on canvas, 91 x 122 cm, Tate.

J.M.W. Turner, The Junction of the Thames and the Medway, 1807, National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Widener Collection.

J.M.W. Turner, Rotterdam Ferry Boat, 1833, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alisa Mellon Bruce Collection.

J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm — Steam Boat off a Harbor's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich, 1842, Oil on canvas, 36 x 48", Tate, London, Bequeathed by the Artist, 1856, © Tate, London.

J.M.W. Turner, Mortlake Terrace, 1827, Oil on canvas, Andrew W. Mellon Collection,© National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The Metropolitan
Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
at 82nd Street
212-535-7710
New York
J.M.W. Turner
July 1-September 21, 2008

The largest retrospective ever presented in the United States of the career of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) is perhaps one of the greatest landscape painters in the history of art. The exhibition of some 146 works, divided almost evenly between oils and works on paper, will include many masterworks that have never been shown in the United States. Turner's extensive range of subjects — including seascapes, topographical views, historical events, mythology, modern life, and scenes drawn from his own fertile imagination — are represented.

J.M.W. Turner is organized by National Gallery of Art, Washington, Dallas Museum of Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in association with Tate Britain, London, which is lending 85 works from its vast and impressive Turner holdings.

Joseph Mallord William Turner dominated the British art world for six decades. Born the son of a barber in 1775 in Covent Garden, London, Turner transformed the genre of landscape painting through works that heralded a new and visionary direction in 19th-century art. At the age of 14, Turner enrolled in the school of the Royal Academy of Arts and soon began submitting works to its annual exhibition. In 1802 Turner was elected a full Royal Academician — the youngest member, at the age of 26, ever admitted — and five years later he became professor of perspective.

Turner was extremely prolific, producing more than 500 paintings and some 1,500 watercolors. He left approximately 100 of his finest and most important finished oils to the British nation. These works, known as the Turner Bequest, are housed primarily at Tate Britain, which also maintains an extensive collection of the artist's works on paper and unfinished paintings.

J.M.W. Turner is divided into ten chronological and thematic sections that span Turner's career:

Turner's early work consisted of drawings and watercolors, which were critically acclaimed. However, in order to be considered a serious artist, Turner studied the oils of old masters, as advised by Royal Academy president Sir Joshua Reynolds. Among his highly praised early efforts was Fishermen at Sea (1796), the first painting he exhibited at the Royal Academy.

The Sublime became a key aspect of Turner's efforts to heighten the significance of his work. Throughout his career he sought to evoke awe and terror in his viewers by depicting cataclysmic events in paintings such as Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812), on view in the United States for the first time.

In 1804 Turner opened a private gallery as an alternative exhibition space. Between 1807 and 1819, Turner issued the Liber Studiorum (Book of Studies), a series of engraved views that surveyed his mastery of a vast array of landscape subjects.

During the first two decades of the 19th century, Britain was almost constantly at war with France, which under Napoleon, was ultimately defeated in 1815. Commissioned by King George IV some 18 years after the event, The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 (1823-1824) is Turner's largest painting (102 by 144 inches) and his only royal commission. More interested in depicting universal truths such as the human cost of war, than in slandering the enemy, Turner painted the suffering experienced by both sides during this renowned battle.

The medium of watercolor remained an essential part of Turner's artistic practice throughout his career. He perfected such innovative techniques as scratching-out, sponging, blotting-out, and wet-into-wet painting. His watercolors served as the basis for engravings illustrating volumes of poetry by Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. Turner also made highly crafted, finished watercolors, such as Temple of Poseidon at Sunion, Cape Colonna (ca. 1834) for exhibition or on commission.

With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the British could once again explore the European continent. Turner visited on established routes as well as off the beaten path in France, Germany, Luxembourg, Bohemia, Switzerland, and Italy. Simultaneously, Turner's palette shifted from naturalistic hues toward a brighter range of pure colors made possible by new pigments, such as the novel yellows used for the sun in Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus — Homer's Odyssey (1829).

Although the classical world continued to provide material for his paintings, Turner was fascinated by modernity and several of his works in the 1820s and 1830s chronicle Britain's transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. From the National Gallery of Art's own collection of 114 works by Turner, Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight (1835) depicts coal workers in the thriving modern port of Newcastle.

On the evening of October 16, 1834, Turner witnessed with thousands of others the fire that devastated the Houses of Parliament — a complex of buildings that stood as a symbol of Britain's historical and political legacy. Turner pursued the theme of man's vulnerability to the forces of nature in dozens of sketches and watercolors depicting the disaster. The studies resulted in two oil paintings of the same name, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (1835), which presented the scene from different vantage points along the banks of the Thames.

Turner's late works are characterized by expressive brushwork and one of his most inventive compositional devices — a vortex of clouds, mist, water, and air that swirls furiously around the central subject. The vortex is the focal point of Snow Storm — Steam Boat off a Harbor's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author was in This Storm on the Night the Ariel Left Harwich (1842), one of Turner's most evocative renderings of the forces of nature.

In the last works of Turner's life, atmosphere and light predominate. His contemporaries described his work as being "without form and void, like chaos before the creation." Renowned British art historian and critic John Ruskin perceived Turner's paintings to be unique in the degree to which they wedded detailed observations of nature to grand general effects. When Turner died in 1851, he left behind hundreds of canvases in his studio, many of them unfinished and unexhibited. In Norham Castle (ca. 1845) Turner's use of thin veils of glowing color resulted in misty and vaporous depictions of the natural world that almost seem to approach pure abstraction. Later generations were struck by the luminosity of Turner's paintings, which had a lasting impact on a variety of artists, including the French impressionists.

The exhibition has been selected by Ian Warrell, curator of 18th- and 19th-century art, Tate Britain, and a team of American curators — Franklin Kelly, senior curator of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art; Dorothy Kosinski, senior curator of painting and sculpture and The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art, Dallas Museum of Art; and Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator in Charge of the Department of 19th-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Franklin Kelly writes in his exhibition catalogue essay Turner and America that although Turner never visited the New World, he was well aware that Americans were interested in his art. Turner did not make any particularly strenuous efforts to promote that interest, and relatively few Americans before the 20th century actually knew his creations firsthand. However the artist and his work, both during his life and after, played an important role in America's artistic culture. Although the majority of Turner's paintings remain in Britain today, by far the largest number outside the country is in the United States.

J. M. W. Turner, (English, 1775-1851), Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute, detail, ca. 1835, Oil on canvas The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1899.