Painting: Landscapist of Light

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The Turners that pleased the public during the artist's 76 years built him a fortune of nearly $700,000. His will left 300 oils and 19,400 sketches and watercolors to the nation, and his money to a fund for those whom he must have thought of as his likenesses: "male decayed artists living in England." Distant but grasping relatives, however, made off with most of Turner's bequest, which has largely remained out of sight ever since.

"Tinted Steam." "Indistinctness is my forte," Turner declared while whirling his images into vortexes of color. On occasion, nature vied with his vision. When he was 59, London's Houses of Parliament were gutted by fire. Turner, who rarely used more than a pencil to sketch out-of-doors, rushed to the bank of the Thames to brush out nine water-colors of the burning buildings (see opposite). He even blotted his copybook pages against each other in his eagerness to capture that dramatic scene. A romantic's delirium, it was the apocalypse brought to reality—the flames mirrored in the water, the starry skies burning with feverish color.

To his contemporaries, such works were full of unrecognizable "blots." Constable, also experimenting in colored light, labeled Turner's work "tinted steam." It was a shrewd perception for, in the days of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, Turner eventually abandoned trite old themes to depict railway trains and steamships roiling, almost defiantly and often indistinctly, through mist and fog. When he titled a painting Sunrise with a Boat Between Headlands, the subject was neither topography nor the boat, which is a barely visible blob, but light refracted by mist.

Aerial Auroras. Turner scorned the highly varnished, precisely glazed look of a "finished" painting. He wanted his paintings to show virtuoso brushwork (sometimes he even daubed with bread rather than bristles). Before exhibitions opened at the Royal Academy, artists traditionally varnished their canvases in sight of the public. Turner, instead, completed his. Spectators gawked as the academician, in top hat and frock coat, stood on a bench daubing away at his already hung oils. With his color box beside him, he mixed pigments in whatever was handy, even stale beer, to touch up details that would provide some visual reference for his baffled viewers. Once, a colorful Constable outshone one of Turner's seascapes. Turner put onto his work a splotch of bright red the size of a shilling that drew eyes away from the Constable. The next day Turner shaped it into a channel buoy.

Turner called clouds "ensanguined sun." Long before the impressionists, he discovered that light is color and let it rule his art, experimented with reflections of light in metal balls. He studied the German poet Goethe's book on color theory, which ascribed brooding, anxious sensations to green, blue and purple as opposed to the liveliness of yellow, red and orange.