J. M. W. Turner.(Current and coming)(Joseph Mallord William Turner's exhibit)

The emergence of the British school of landscape painting at the beginning of the nineteenth century has long been attributed to the influence of two great masters of the genre, John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner. Though as is often the case, neither of their work was as highly regarded during their lifetimes as it is now. Constable, an intellectual painter of mostly idyllic views of the English countryside, was more popular in France than in England. When his studio collection was auctioned after his death in 1837, only a small portion of the works sold. Likewise, Turner's long career was marked by both enormous critical success and by controversy and even outrage. Both he and his paintings frequently inspired uneasiness. Constable expressed the opinion held by many of his contemporaries in Regency London when he referred to Turner as "uncouth." The remarkable, visionary qualities of his paintings, though, were such that even Constable had to admit that Turner had "a wonderful range of mind."

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The most comprehensive survey of Turner's work ever presented in the United States has been organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, in association with the Tate Britain in London, and is on view at the National Gallery until January 6, 2008. It features some 145 works, equally divided between oils and works on paper, 85 of which are on loan from the Tate, which houses the Turner Bequest, a group of approximately 100 completed oils that the artist left to Great Britain upon his death.

The exhibition is organized into ten sections that span the artist's career and explore in depth specific aspects of his production, including his early efforts in oil made during his student days at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, his highly refined watercolors, paintings he made while traveling on the Continent, and his visionary late works. A section, for example, is devoted to the two oil paintings and dozens of related sketches and watercolors that Turner made after he, with ...