Turner's daringly loose brushwork and dazzling colors shine in his watercolors J.M.W. Turner, one of Britain's greatest painters, is perhaps known best for his oil paintings. But he was a lifelong watercolorist, and he fundamentally reshaped what would be understood as possible within the medium, both during his lifetime and after. Edited in partnership with Tate Britain, where the majority of the artist's works are conserved, Conversations with Turner: The Watercolorsis published on the occasion of a major exhibition spanning the entirety of Turner's career. Divided into six thematic sections, it focuses on the critical role played by watercolors in defining Turner's personal style. The book brings together texts by prominent scholars of Turner's art, including the art historians and curators Tim Barringer, Alexander Nemerov, Oliver Meslay and Susan Grace Galassi. Comprised of 100 works (all of which are reproduced in this volume), the exhibition was selected from upward of 30,000 works on paper, 300 oil paintings, and 280 sketchbooks donated after the artist's death in 1851, as part of the collection known as the "Turner Bequest." Turner's innovations in watercolor are illustrated in this book through an emphasis on landscapes and seascapes, many of which were painted during Turner's long stays abroad in continental Europe and beyond. The works showcase the development of Turner's stylistic language, focused on experimentation with the expressive potential of light and color, which anticipated trends in late-19th-century painting. J.M.W. Turner(1775-1851) was a controversial figure throughout his career, despite being championed by Ruskin and having played a key role in the elevation of pure landscape painting as a genre, which he took to unprecedented levels of abstraction. He traveled widely in Europe, starting with France and Switzerland in 1802 and studying in the Louvre in Paris in the same year, and later making many visits to Venice.

The life of one of Western art's most admired and misunderstood painters J.M.W. Turner is one of the most important figures in Western art, and his visionary work paved the way for a revolution in landscape painting. Over the course of his lifetime, Turner strove to liberate painting from an antiquated system of patronage. Bringing a new level of expression and color to his canvases, he paved the way for the modern artist. Turner was very much a man of his changing era. In his lifetime, he saw Britain ravaged by Napoleonic wars, revived by the Industrial Revolution, and embarked upon a new moment of Imperial glory with the ascendancy of Queen Victoria. His own life embodied astonishing transformation. Born the son of a barber in Covent Garden, he was buried amid pomp and ceremony in St. Paul's Cathedral. Turner was accepted into the prestigious Royal Academy at the height of the French Revolution when a climate of fear dominated Britain. Unable to travel abroad he explored at home, reimagining the landscape to create some of the most iconic scenes of his country. But his work always had a profound human element. When a moment of peace allowed travel into Europe, Turner was one of the first artists to capture the beauty of the Alps, to revive Venice as a subject, and to follow in Byron’s footsteps through the Rhine country. While he was commercially successful for most of his career, Turner's personal life remained fraught. His mother suffered from mental illness and was committed to Bedlam. Turner never married but had several long-term mistresses and illegitimate daughters. His erotic drawings were numerous but were covered up by prurient Victorians after his death. Turner's late, impressionistic work was held up by his Victorian detractors as example of a creeping madness. Affection for the artist’s work soured. John Ruskin, the greatest of all 19th century art critics, did what he could to rescue Turner’s reputation, but Turner’s very last works confounded even his greatest defender. TURNER humanizes this surprising genius while placing him in his fascinating historical context. Franny Moyle brilliantly tells the story of the man to give us an astonishing portrait of the artist and a vivid evocation of Britain and Europe in flux.

A National Book Critics Circle Finalist for Criticism A deeply Malcolmian volume on painters, photographers, writers, and critics. Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer, as well as her books about Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein, are canonical in the realm of nonfiction—as is the title essay of this collection, with its forty-one "false starts," or serial attempts to capture the essence of the painter David Salle, which becomes a dazzling portrait of an artist. Malcolm is "among the most intellectually provocative of authors," writes David Lehman in The Boston Globe, "able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight." Here, in Forty-one False Starts, Malcolm brings together essays published over the course of several decades (largely in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that reflect her preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. She explores Bloomsbury's obsessive desire to create things visual and literary; the "passionate collaborations" behind Edward Weston's nudes; and the character of the German art photographer Thomas Struth, who is "haunted by the Nazi past," yet whose photographs have "a lightness of spirit." In "The Woman Who Hated Women," Malcolm delves beneath the "onyx surface" of Edith Wharton's fiction, while in "Advanced Placement" she relishes the black comedy of the Gossip Girl novels of Cecily von Zeigesar. In "Salinger's Cigarettes," Malcolm writes that "the pettiness, vulgarity, banality, and vanity that few of us are free of, and thus can tolerate in others, are like ragweed for Salinger's helplessly uncontaminated heroes and heroines." "Over and over," as Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, "she has demonstrated that nonfiction—a book of reporting, an article in a magazine, something we see every day—can rise to the highest level of literature." One of Publishers Weekly's Best Nonfiction Books of 2013

J.M.W. Turner's lifetime (1775-1851). was also the classic age of the English watercolor, and his mastery and perfection of the medium coincided with its establishment as an independent art form. He rarely left his home without a sketchbook, pencils, and a small traveling case of watercolors. He exploited as no one before him the medium's luminosity and transparency, conjuring light effects on English meadows and Venetian lagoons and gauzy mists over mountains and lakes. Extraordinary in his own time, he has continued to thrill countless admirers since. In an extensive and illuminating introduction, internationally acclaimed Turner expert David Blayney Brown provides a context to the watercolors and a background to the Tate's unrivalled collection of Turner's work.

Excerpt from Turner's Water-Colours at Farnley Hall Lister Parker. Mr. Parker was a neighbour of Mr. Fawkes, and that he was also an intimate friend is proved by the inscription on the back of a fine miniature of Napoleon Bonaparte, which is still pre served at Farnley Hall. This inscription states that the miniature was bought in Paris in I 802, and pre sented to Mr. Fawkes in the same year by his sincere friend Mr. Lister Parker. So it is probable that Mr. Fawkes may have heard Turner's work talked about by his Yorkshire friends some time before he bought any of the artist's drawings, and it is quite possible that he may have made Turner's personal acquaint ance through the intermediacy of those friends. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) is considered Britain's greatest painter. While he is best known for his stunning oils, Turner also created major works in watercolor, many of which rival his oils in their breadth of scale, depth of tone, richness of color, and wealth of detail. This handsome volume, published on the 150th anniversary of Turner's death to accompany an unparalleled exhibition of his finished watercolors at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, is a milestone in Turner scholarship.Eric Shanes, a well-known expert on Turner and curator of the related exhibition, places the artist's watercolors in the wider context of his painted work and provides individual commentaries on the approximately 200 lush colorplates. Evelyn Joll investigates the market forces that brought Turner's watercolors into being, while Andrew Wilton analyzes their extraordinary effect on the art of later watercolorists. Finally, Ian Warrell discusses the critical reception to the work of this prodigiously talented artist. Turner: The Great Watercolours will stand at the forefront of thinking on Turner for years to come.

Modern Histories: Turner's Chronicles of War, Peace, and the Course of Empire / by Gillian Forrester -- Shifting Currents: Turner's Depictions of Coasts, Rivers, Harbors, and Ports in the 1820s / by Ian Warrell -- Liminal Spaces: Turner's Paintings of Dieppe and Cologne / by Susan Grace Galassi -- 'Unfinished Productions': History and Process in Turner's 1820s Port Scenes of Dieppe, Cologne, and Brest / by Rebecca Hellen -- Inglorious Histories: Turner's Ancient Ports / by Joanna Sheers Seidenstein.