Joseph Mallord William Turner was the most celebrated British painter of the 19th century and a visionary precursor of Impressionism and abstraction. Born in London, the son of a barber, he was admitted to the Royal Academy at 14. He spent his career pushing the representation of light, atmosphere, and elemental natural forces to ever more extreme degrees of dissolution. His late canvases approach pure abstraction. He left nearly 300 oil paintings and 20,000 watercolors and drawings to the British nation.
