The following images are two paintings of Richmond:

The following overview of Turner and his work was taken from Britannica Online:

Turner, J.M.W.,

JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER (b. April 23, 1775, London, Eng.--d. Dec. 19, 1851, London), English Romantic landscape painter whose expressionistic studies of light, colour, and atmosphere were unmatched in their range and sublimity. His marine paintings are particularly notable.

Early life and works.

Turner was the son of a barber, but nothing is known about his mother except that she died insane in 1804. At the age of 10 Turner was sent to live with an uncle at Brentford, Middlesex, where he attended school. Several drawings dated as early as 1787 are sufficiently professional to corroborate the tradition that his father used to sell the boy's work to his customers. After some instruction under Thomas Malton, a topographical watercolourist, Turner entered the Royal Academy schools in 1789 and soon began exhibiting his watercolours there. He used to spend the summer holidays touring the country in search of subjects for his sketchbooks, which he filled with drawings to be worked up later into finished watercolours. His early work is topographical (concerned with the accurate depiction of places) in character and imitative of the best English masters of the day. In 1794 Turner began working for engravers, supplying designs for the Copper Plate Magazine and the Pocket Magazine. Engraved views of picturesque ruins of castles and abbeys were much in demand at the time. He was also employed at making copies or elaborations of unfinished drawings by the recently deceased landscape painter Robert Cozens. The influence of Cozens and of the Welsh landscape painter Richard Wilson helped broaden Turner's outlook and revealed to him a more poetic and imaginative approach to landscape, which he would pursue to the end of his career with ever-increasing brilliance.

From 1796 Turner began to exhibit oil paintings as well as watercolours at the Royal Academy. The first one, "Fishermen at Sea," is a moonlight scene and was acclaimed by a contemporary critic as the work "of an original mind." In 1799, at the youngest permitted age (24), Turner was elected an associate of the Royal Academy, and in 1802 he became a full academician, a dignity he marked by a series of large pictures in which he emulated the achievements of the old masters, especially the 17th-century painters Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Aelbert Cuyp, and the Van de Veldes. He took his duties seriously, attending academic functions regularly, filling various offices, and ultimately bequeathing 20,000 to the Academy. He was helpful and encouraging to other artists insofar as his shyness and brusque manner allowed. In 1807 he was appointed professor of perspective. His infrequent lectures were said to have been difficult to follow but worth it for his diagrams. About 1800 Turner took a studio at 64 Harley Street, London, and in 1804 opened a private gallery, where he continued to show his latest work for many seasons. He was by this time overwhelmed with commissions, and the success of his career was assured.

In 1800 Turner's mother became hopelessly ill and was committed to a mental hospital. His father came to live with him and devoted the rest of his life to serving as a studio assistant and general agent. Turner's private life, such as it was, was secretive, unsociable, and somewhat eccentric. In 1798 he entered into an affair, which was to last about 10 years, with Sarah Danby, a widow who bore him two children. As he never married, was close with money, and devoted his time almost entirely to his art, he was able to amass a considerable fortune.

Turner continued to travel in search of inspiration. His travels took him in 1797 to Yorkshire and the Lake District, in 1798 to Wales again, in 1801 to Scotland, and in 1802 to the European continent for the first time. The crossing to Calais was rough, and in his picture "Calais Pier" (1802-03; National Gallery, London) he left a vivid record of his experience on arrival. He made more than 400 drawings during this tour of France and Switzerland and continued for many years after to paint pictures of scenes that had impressed him on the tour. The most important of these are three pictures of Bonneville, Savoy (1803 and 1812); "The Festival upon the Opening of the Vintage at Macon" (1803; Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield); the watercolours "Devil's Bridge" and "The Great Falls of the Reichenbach" (1804; Cecil Higgins Museum, Bedford); "Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen" (1806; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); and "Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps" (1812; Tate Gallery, London).

Turner's many seapieces, in which he surpasses the Dutch 17th-century marine painters, reveal his methodical attempt to master every landscape style he admired and the ease with which he accomplished this. The rivalry he felt with painters who had influenced his style--Poussin, Wilson, and Claude, for example--is suggested by his bequest to the National Gallery of his "Dido Building Carthage, or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire" (1815) and "Sun Rising Through Vapour: Fishermen Cleaning and Selling Fish" (1807) on condition that they be hung beside his two favourite Claudes. The treatment of landscape in the oil Thames sketches of about 1807 and "The Shipwreck" (1805; Tate Gallery) suggests that at this time Turner was developing his original approach to landscape--emphasizing luminosity, atmosphere, and romantic, dramatic subjects.

In 1807 Turner began his great enterprise of publishing a series of 100 plates known as the Liber Studiorum. His aim was to perpetuate the great variety and range of his work; some of the subjects were taken from existing paintings and watercolours; others were specially designed for the Liber. He employed several engravers, although he supervised the work at every stage, etched some of the plates himself, and made innumerable preparatory drawings. The publication was issued in parts consisting of five plates each, covering all the styles of landscape composition, such as historical, architectural, mountainous, pastoral, and marine. The first part appeared in June 1807 and the last in 1819, when Turner evidently lost interest in the project and abandoned it after the publication of 71 plates.

Middle years

During the second decade of the 1800s, Turner's painting became increasingly luminous and atmospheric in quality. Even in paintings of actual places, as "St. Mawes at the Pilchard Season" (1812; Tate Gallery) and the two pictures of Oxford painted between 1809 and 1812 (exhibited in 1812), the hard facts of topography are diffused behind pearly films of colour; other pictures, such as "Frosty Morning" (1813; Tate Gallery), are based entirely on effects of light. Among the most ethereal landscapes of this period are "Lake of Geneva" (1810; Los Angeles County Museum), "Crossing the Brook" (1815; Tate Gallery), and "England; Richmond Hill, on the Prince Regent's Birthday" (1819; Tate Gallery), one of his largest and most ambitious pictures. Turner was much in demand as a painter of castles and countryseats for their owners. Two examples of such paintings are "Somer Hill, Tunbridge" and "Linlithgow Palace" (1810; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). He also continued to excel in marine painting, one of the most ambitious works being "Wreck of a Transport Ship" (1810; Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon).

With "Dido and Aeneas, Leaving Carthage on the Morning of the Chase" (1814; Tate Gallery), Turner began a series of Carthaginian subjects. The last exhibits of his life, at the Academy in 1850, included four works on the same theme. By appending long poetic quotations either from James Thomson's Seasons, from works by Lord Byron, John Milton, William Shakespeare, and Alexander Pope, or from his own long poetic composition Fallacies of Hope, Turner showed that he regarded the literary-historical interpretation of his works as of paramount importance.

As if he felt that he had done all he could with the beauty of his native country, Turner set out in the summer of 1819 on his first visit to Italy. He spent three months in Rome--visited Naples, Florence, and Venice--and returned home in midwinter. During his journey he made about 1,500 drawings, and in the next few years he painted a series of pictures inspired by what he had seen. They show a great advance in his style, particularly in the matter of colour, which becomes purer, more prismatic, with a general heightening of key. A comparison of "The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl" (1823; Tate Gallery) with any of the earlier pictures reveals a far more iridescent treatment resembling the transparency of a watercolour. The shadows are as colourful as the lights, and he achieves contrasts by setting off cold and warm colours instead of dark and light tones.

During the 1820s, tours of the continent alternated with visits to various parts of England and Scotland. In 1825 Turner revisited The Netherlands and Belgium and the following year the Meuse, Moselle, and Loire rivers. Notable among the pictures of this period are such views as "The Harbor of Dieppe," "Cologne: The Arrival of a Packet Boat: Evening," and "Mortlake Terrace: Early Summer Morning" (Frick Collection, New York City). In 1827 he painted the brilliant sketches of the regatta now at the Tate Gallery, and in 1828 he went to Italy again. After his father's death in 1829, Turner often visited the Earl of Egremont at Petworth, Sussex. His splendid sketches of Petworth probably belong to the early 1830s.

Later life and works

In the last years of his life, Turner was more famous, richer, and more secretive than ever. After several years of inactivity as professor of perspective at the Royal Academy, he resigned in 1838. In 1839 he bought a cottage in Chelsea, where he lived incognito under the assumed name of Booth. He was looked after by his old housekeeper, who guarded his privacy so zealously that she made it difficult for people to gain admission to his gallery. Turner continued to travel, however. In the last 15 years of his life, he revisited Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and France. Observers have recorded the untiring energy with which he sketched while abroad, and the drawings, numbering about 19,000 in the Turner Bequest, bear witness to this labour.

While Turner's earlier paintings and drawings show the most accurate observation of architectural and natural detail, in his later work this is sacrificed to general effects of colour and light with the barest indication of mass. His composition tends to become more fluid, suggesting movement and space; some of his paintings are mere colour notations, barely tinted on a white ground, such as "Norham Castle, Sunrise" and "Sunrise, with a Boat Between Headlands" (1835-45; Tate Gallery). This approach may account for the large number of slightly brushed-in canvases found in Turner's studio at the time of his death. These colourful abstractions are far more appreciated now than the historical and mythological subjects he exhibited.

Apart from fanciful reconstructions of ancient Rome and the scintillating Venetian cityscapes, which found ready purchasers in his day, the outstanding examples of his late work are "The Parting of Hero and Leander" (1837; National Gallery), a daring composition of sunset and moonlight with visions of spirits rising from the waters; "The 'Fighting Téméraire' Tugged to Her Last Berth To Be Broken Up, 1838" (1839; National Gallery), a tribute to the passing age of sailing ships as they were about to be replaced by steam-powered vessels; and "Rain, Steam, and Speed--the Great Western Railway" (1844; National Gallery [see photograph]), which expresses Turner's intense interest in the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution. Actually, the first picture to be hung in Britain's National Gallery was the opalescent "Venice from the Steps of the Europa" (1842), presented in 1847, while Turner was still alive. Turner's preoccupation with the elements of fire and water appears in the "Burning of the Houses of Parliament" (1835; Tate Gallery), in the large sketch "Fire at Sea" (Tate Gallery), and in "Rockets and Blue Lights" (1840; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.).

Turner died in 1851 and was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. By his will he intended to leave most of his fortune of 140,000 to found a charity for "decayed artists," and he bequeathed his finished paintings to the National Gallery, on condition that a separate gallery be built to exhibit them. As a result of protracted litigation with his rather distant relatives, most of the money reverted to them, while the paintings and drawings of the Turner Bequest became national property. It was not until 1908 that a special gallery was built by Sir Joseph Duveen to house some of the oil paintings at the Tate Gallery. All the drawings and watercolours were transferred to the British Museum for safety after the Thames flood of 1928, when the storerooms at the Tate Gallery were inundated. The oil paintings of the Turner Bequest are now divided between the Tate Gallery and the National Gallery. Those at the Tate are housed in the Clore Gallery (1987), an addition designed by James Stirling expressly for that purpose.

Assessment

Turner was perhaps the greatest landscapist of the 19th century. Although brought up in the academic traditions of the 18th century, he became a pioneer in the study of light, colour, and atmosphere. He anticipated the French Impressionists in breaking down conventional formulas of representation; but, unlike them, he believed that his works must always express significant historical, mythological, literary, or other narrative themes. A line of development can be traced from his early historical landscapes that form settings for important human subjects, such as the plagues of Egypt or the story of Dido and Aeneas, to his later studies of sea and sky. Even without figures, these late works are expressions of important subjects: the relationship of man to his environment, to the power of nature as manifested in the terror of the storm or the beneficence of the sun. Unmatched in his time in the range of his development, Turner was also unrivaled in the breadth of his subject matter and the searching innovation of his stylistic treatment.

Even early in the 19th century, Turner was strongly criticized by the more conservative critics for his dynamic compositions and high-keyed colour. By the end of his life, although his Venetian subjects and more finished watercolours still appealed to some purchasers, his style had developed along lines totally different from the contemporary taste for realism and high finish typified by the Pre-Raphaelite movement (founded 1848). Turner's immense reputation in the second half of the 19th century was in fact due largely to the championship of the influential English art critic John Ruskin, who published the first part of Modern Painters in 1843 to prove Turner's superiority to all previous landscape painters and to extol his accurate rendering of natural appearance. The 20th century has witnessed a new appreciation of the abstract qualities of Turner's late colour compositions, and thereby strengthened his status as one of the most innovative and technically gifted painters of his own century.

Further information

Try the following link to see some fine examples of Turner's great works:

http://sunsite.auc.dk/cgfa/turner/

"Turner, J.M.W." Britannica Online.
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