J. M. W. Turner

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Joseph Mallord William Turner was an English painter and artist.

He was born in London around April 23 1775 (no one is quite sure of the exact date). His father was a maker of wigs. His mother was ill with mental problems, and the young Turner was sent to live with his uncle in Brentford, where he first started to paint.

Turner became a student at the Royal Academy of Art in London when he was 15 years old. He had a watercolour painting in 1790 in the Academy's important art show. He had only been studying for a year. In 1802, at the age of only 28, he was elected a member of the Royal Acadamy, and later became its Professor of Pespective. In 1802, Turner travelled around Europe, visiting France and Switzerland. He also went to the Louvre in Paris. During his life, he often travelled across Europe, visiting Venice in Italy several times. As his personal style developed, he began to produce romantic paintings that were generalised or exaggerated in form and colour, rather than realistic or detailed. These caused much argument as to their artistic value, but nowadays are his best loved works. On his death, he left 300 oils and 20,000 watercolours to the British nation. Some of his watercolours are the most abstract or generalised of his paintings.

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Turner never married, although he had two children with his mistress Sarah Danby. For much of his life, he lived with his father, who helped him in his studio until he died in 1829.

In his early career, Turner was influenced by the painters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, who painted "historical" landscapes.

His most famous paintings include The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up. Often called just The Fighting Temeraire, this is a picture of a famous warship that was used in the Battle of Trafalgar. Other pictures include Rain, Steam and Speed, which shows a steam train crossing a bridge, and Snowstorm which shows a steamship in a snowstorm trying to get into a harbour. In order to get the right feeling into this painting, he had himself tied to a ship's mast during a storm, so that he could see what it was like. Some of his most famous paintings show the roughness of nature, with bleak landscapes and violent storms.

As he grew older, Turner's behaviour became a bit odd, and he became depressed quite often. He died in Chelsea on September 19 1851, and was buried next to the painter Joshua Reynolds in St Paul's Cathedral.

Even while Turner was alive, some people thought he was a genius. Some people complained that the pictures he painted when he was older were not realistic, and some even joked that they could have been painted with a mop. However, most think that his way of painting shows complete mastery.