Travel Pick: Art and Archaeology in United States
J.M.W. Turner

This exhibition is the most comprehensive survey of Turner's work ever presented in the United States. More than 145 paintings and watercolors reveal the astonishing talent and imagination of this artist—whom Alfred, Lord Tennyson called "The Shakespeare of landscape."


Joseph Mallord William Turner
The Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, 1843
Given in memory of Governor Alvan T. Fuller by The Fuller Foundation, Inc.
Photo courtesy of Dallas Museum of Art

Among the important works on view are Tintern Abbey (1794), The Battle of Fort Rock, Val d’Aoste, Piedmont 1796 (1815), Sunset (c. 1820–1830), and Norham Castle, on the River Tweed (c. 1822–1823), all from Tate Britain.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born the son of a barber in Covent Garden, London. He worked as an assistant to an architect and studied at the Royal Academy Schools. His early work consisted of drawings and watercolors; he exhibited his first oil painting, Fishermen at Sea, in 1796 at the Royal Academy. Success came at the age of 27 and Turner eventually came to see his works as rivaling those of the old masters of European art.

During his career he prolifically documented his travels throughout England, Scotland, Wales, France, Switzerland, and Italy. In his late period, when Turner was concerned with the painting of light, subject matter became almost secondary. He sent paintings to the Royal Academy and described them as being “without form and void, like chaos before the creation.” Renowned British art historian and critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) perceived Turner’s paintings to be unique in the degree to which they wedded detailed observations of nature to grand general effects.

After Dallas, the show travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (June 24–September 21, 2008).