Artist J.M.W. Turner, RA. The Engravings. Perhaps the most famous English Romantic landscape artist. Turner products many engravings and was very hands-on in there progress to printings.

Boats off Calais

One of the beautifully composed and carefully execute early painting of Turner, when, though painting all things direct from nature itself, he had not emancipated himself entirely from the influence the Dutch painters of marine subjects. But though such compositions are common enough, they never tire when they are beautiful as this. There is an inexhaustible beauty of colour and form in sea and sky and sail and boat which will never fail to produce new and beautiful combinations as long as art exists; and if there is something of Vandervelde discernible in the arrangement of the masses of light and shade, there is a depth of original observation traceable in the execution of the painting which is, perhaps, more true to nature and contains more of her truth than any picture painted before Turner. In the painting of the sea alone Turner advanced his art more in a few years than other painters had in centuries. With him the conventional wave, with its one side all light its other all dark. with little depth or transparency. and without an attempt at representing its infinite reflective power, disappeared, and instead we had real water—the liquid movable mirror, with its Protean elasticity and its incompressible force.

Search