Joseph Mallord William Turner: Conway Castle, North Wales, 1798

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851)
digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program

Turner was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style can be said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. He entered the Royal Academy of Art schools in 1789, when he was only 14 years old, and was accepted into the academy a year later. Although renowned for his oils, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolour landscape painting. He  travelled widely in Europe, and made many visits to Venice.

On a dramatic, rocky area of the northern coast of Wales looms the late medieval Conway Castle. It towers over a stormy bay while fisherman struggle to pull their boats ashore. Caught in this uproaring of the sea, the tiny figures of fishermen in their boat convey a sense of humans' barely significant place in the order of the universe. The Welsh landscape exerted a strong hold on Turner, and he made several sketching trips there in the 1790s. In this early Romantic painting, Turner represented the dramatic effects of natural light, allowing sunshine breaking through the clouds to illuminate the castle and the coast beyond.

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