The Life and Masterworks of J.M.W. Turner

‘Turner has some golden visions, glorious and beautiful; they are only visions, but still they are art, and one could live and die with such pictures....’ — JOHN CONSTABLE, 1828‘J.M.W. Turner is the only man who has ever given an entire transcript of the whole system of nature, and is, in this point of view, the only perfect landscape painter whom the world has ever seen....We have had, living with us, and painting for us, the greatest painter of all time; a man with whose supremacy of power no intellect of past ages can be put in comparison for a moment.’ — JOHN RUSKIN, 1843‘A group of French painters, united by the same aesthetic tendencies, struggling for ten years against convention and routine to bring art back to the scrupulously exact observation of nature, applying themselves with passion to therendering of the reality of forms in movement, as well as to the fugitive phenomenon of light, cannot forget that it has been preceded in this path by a great master of the English School, the illustrious Turner.’Excerpt from a letter signed by EUGÈNE BOUDIN, EDGAR DEGAS, CLAUDE MONET, CAMILLE PISSARRO, AUGUSTE RENOIR, ALFRED SISLEY, MARY CASSATT, BERTHE MORISOT andother artists in 1882-1883‘Turner, the greatest creator of mystery in all art.’ — CLAUDE DEBUSSY, 1908The following was written of the first edition of this book: ‘Eric Shanes’s Turner offers, as we should expect from the editor of Turner Studies, an unusually rich and stimulating read, incorporating as it does the results of much recent research.’ — Dr JOHN GAGE, in The Burlington Magazine