Collection: Art prints by William Turner

William Turner is considered one of the boldest and most influential painters in European art history. He was born in London in 1775, the son of a barber, and showed an extraordinary talent at an early age, which gained him admission to the Royal Academy of Arts as a teenager. His training was thorough and classical: he studied the great landscape painters of the past, in particular Claude Lorrain, whose ideal light landscapes made a deep impression on him and whose example he aspired to throughout his life - and at the same time left far behind. Extensive travels through England, Wales and later through Europe, especially the Alps and Italy, provided him with an inexhaustible reservoir of impressions, which he recorded in thousands of sketches and watercolors.

Turner developed an obsessive interest in light and atmospheric phenomena early on. His focus was not on the motif itself, but on the sensual experience of light, movement and the force of nature - the immediate impression of a moment in which sky, water and air merge into an inseparable unity. Clear contours and detailed elaboration increasingly receded, while color and light took on an ever more dominant role. This view of painting was met with incomprehension by parts of the public and critics, but also found passionate defenders, above all the influential art critic John Ruskin, who celebrated Turner as the greatest painter of his time.

From the 1830s onwards, Turner's painting style became increasingly radicalized. In his large seascapes, his Alpine landscapes and his views of Venice, forms and contours began to dissolve in a vortex of light and atmosphere. His paintings of Venice in particular exemplify this development: the city appears not as a solid structure of stone and water, but as a dream of color and light in which architecture and reflection can hardly be distinguished from one another. And his late railroad paintings, above all the famous "Rain, Steam and Speed", translate the new, overwhelming experience of speed and industrial power into a visual language that unites the familiar and the threatening in a single swirl of color.

In his late works, Turner finally took a step that left his contemporaries baffled and only later generations were able to understand its full consequences. The dissolution of form was now almost complete: What remains are swirls of colour, explosions of light and atmospheric condensations in which a ship, a storm or a sunset can only be recognized as a hint of a motif. This radical concentration on the pure visual experience, on color and light as independent pictorial subjects, made Turner a forerunner of Impressionism and far beyond - artists from Monet to the abstract expressionists of the 20th century recognized in him a pioneer who had opened up possibilities in painting that they themselves only fully exploited decades later.

During his lifetime, Turner was successful, famous and at the same time controversial. The Royal Academy honored him early on, collectors coveted his works, but his later paintings were increasingly met with rejection and ridicule. He lived a reclusive and eccentric life, hoarding most of his works and bequeathing them to the nation on his death. He died in London in 1851. Today, William Turner is considered one of the most important painters in Western art history - a visionary whose work transcends the boundaries between Romanticism, Impressionism and abstract painting in a way that makes him a contemporary of all subsequent generations, and whose paintings in the world's great museums are among the most highly regarded and influential works in art history.