A Coast Scene with Fishermen Hauling a Boat Ashore (The Iveagh Seapiece), c.1803/04 Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851)

The son of a London barber, Turner began his professional career in the world of engraving - he was a colorist of engravings and drawings, and apprenticed to an architectural draughtsman before entering the Royal Academy Schools in 1789. From the 1790s he painted large-scale oils, sea-pieces, history paintings and historical landscapes, and on the strength of these became an Academician in 1802 and was Professor of Perspective from 1807 until 1837. Turner's first visit to the Swiss Alps followed in the steps of J. R. Cozens - Turner spent three years in the late 1790s copying Dr. Thomas Munro's collection of Cozens’s watercolors, and he coupled his technique and compositional invention with the full drama of the chasms and ruggedness of the Alpine mountains cape. His later trips to Italy and the Alps produced his greatest experiments in light and weather effects.
The Society of Painters in Water-Colors (later the Old Water-Color Society) was founded in 1802, and Turner was a prime force behind its establishment although he never became a member. The aim was to show watercolor as a medium equal to oil in the historical genre, to combine figures and grandiose landscape in heroic style. Girtin and Turner, traditionally considered the fathers of British watercolor, were firmly rooted in the importance of observation. Turner's Study of Fish: Two Tench, a Trout and a Perch (1822) and Head of a Heron (1815) are watercolor studies of natural phenomena - the pattern and reflection of the types of fish, the plumage on the bird's head. Observation of such realistic detail would be seen again in paintings of High Victorian realism and in the minutiae of Pre-Raphaelitism. During the 1820s and 1830s, Turner illustrated a number of topographical books. The most ambitious, Picturesque Views in England and Wales, was not a financial success: travel on the Continent was again possible, and whilst the eighteenth-century traveler had visited the classical sites, the nineteenth-century middle-class tourist was more interested in novelty and exoticism.
In oil, as in watercolor, Turner explored mythological, biblical, historical and marine painting, while developing a theory of color association and an examination of light that would fascinate the Impressionists. The origins of his most famous early history piece, Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812), and his shipwrecks lay in Burke's theory of the sublime, which gave precedence over ideal beauty to pictorial effects that produced the strongest emotion. At the same time, Turner was painting British landscape in Ideal form, for example Richmond Hill on the Prince Regent's Birthday (1819).This search for subliminal naturalism lies behind much of his work, whether in the swirling waves of his 'shock' oil paintings of shipwrecks and sea storms or in the study of light and pure color in his watercolors.