Turner and the sea. (Current and Coming).(Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland)(Brief Article)

At this death in 1851 the visionary artist Joseph Mallord William Turner bequeathed three hundred oils, more than twenty thousand drawings and watercolors, and some three hundred sketchbooks to Great Britain's national collections (then housed in the National Gallery in London). They are today in the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain in London. During his lifetime, Turner purposely kept some of his works off the market and repurchased others. Thus his bequest contains important examples spanning his entire and very productive career.

The Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland is the only American museum to show an exhibition entitled Reflections of Sea and Light: Paintings and Watercolors by J. MW Turner from Tate, which will be on view until May 26. It comprises more than one hundred watercolors, paintings, drawings, and prints selected by Ian Warrell, one of the curators at the Tate, to represent an overview of some forty years of the artist's output. More than two dozen of these pictures have never before been exhibited.

Turner demonstrated keen artistic talent as a child, exhibiting a watercolor at the Royal Academy when he was just fifteen. Water in all of its forms--rivers, lakes, seas, and rain--preoccupied him throughout his career, and his early, more academic works include scenes of ships along the shores of the Thames River. ...