The Painter Of Light:

I'm sure everyone is familiar with the paintings of his ships at sea... most history books are filled with them. J.M.W. Turner (Joseph Mallord William Turner) -- the son of a barber and wig maker, and mother, Mary Marshall, a housewife -- was born in 1775 at Covent Garden in London. Turner received almost no general education but at 14 was already a student at the Royal Academy of Arts. In 1791 for the first time he exhibited two watercolours at the Royal Academy. He was a Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style is said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolour landscape painting. He is commonly known as "the painter of light." At the time of his death, Turner left some three hundred paintings and nineteen thousand watercolours to his credit.

The above painting, Mortlake Terrace (1827) is my favorite. A fashionable London suburb, Mortlake Terrace lies next to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, visible here on the distant bend of the River Thames. This is one of a pair of views commissioned by the owner of a town house, The Limes, named after the magnificent lime trees lining its terrace. Both scenes portray the blazing disk of the sun, flashing a reflection from the stone parapet. This painting looks west over the garden at sunset after the children have abandoned their toys. A black dog barks at the Lord Mayor’s flag-decked barge. This dark accent, which enhances the summer evening’s hazy paleness, was a last-minute addition. Just before the Royal Academy show opened in 1827, Turner cut the dog out of paper, stuck it onto the wet varnish, and touched it up with highlights and a collar... now that's modern!