J. M. W. Turner

Turner was a barber's son from Covent Garden who entered the Royal Academy schools at fourteen, exhibited there at fifteen, and became a full Academician at twenty-six — about as fast as the English art establishment has ever moved. For the first half of his career he competed openly with the dead: specifically with Claude Lorrain, whose golden harbour scenes he set out to equal and then to surpass, and he left paintings to the nation on the condition that they hang beside Claudes so the comparison could be made. The second half is the one that matters to later painting. From the 1830s the subject progressively dissolves into light and weather, the paint gets both thinner and thicker in the same canvas, and critics who had admired him started complaining they could not tell what they were looking at. He travelled constantly and sketched obsessively — the Turner Bequest left to Britain contains some three hundred oils and roughly thirty thousand works on paper. He was secretive about his private life, lived under an assumed name in Chelsea at the end, and left a will that was contested for years.