“Light is therefore color” – Celebrating 250 Years of J.M.W. Turner

A revolutionary painter who was one of Britain’s greatest and most visionary artists, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) transformed the foundations of art with his romantically swept landscapes, bold coloring, and an abstract luminosity in his later works that helped lay the foundations of Impressionism and modern art.

“We are all descended from the Englishman Turner,” said the Danish-French Impressionist Camille Pissarro, whose artistic ideals owe a debt of gratitude to J.M.W. Turner’s atmospheric and interpretive maritime scenes like The Fighting Temeraire (1839) and Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840).

And two and a half centuries after his birth, Turner remains not only relevant but a revered revolutionary artist in Britain where he has a prestigious art prize in his name, his face on the £20 note, and his work voted the Greatest Painting in Britain.

Turner was an artist far ahead of his time who preceded the Impressionist movement later in the 19th century and the Abstract Expressionists in the mid-20th with the bold coloring of his paintings that played with light and the deconstruction of form. And in doing so revolutionized the way we look at art.

Churning Seascapes, Radiating Skies

If you were getting a haircut in early 19th century Covent Garden then you may well have seen Turner’s work hanging alongside periwigs in his father’s barber shop. The customers were among the first owners of his artwork, before a long and successful career that led the art critic John Ruskin to describe him in 1840 as, “the man who beyond all doubt is the greatest of the age”.

Born in Covent Garden, London, Turner was a prodigy who entered the Royal Academy of Arts at just 14 years old. A year later he exhibited his first work in the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition with a delicate and precise watercolor View of the Archbishop’s Place, Lambeth. Based in central London and Brentford on the outskirts of the city, Turner’s fascination with nature, the effects of light, and the emotional impact of color pushed the young artist to travel and absorb scenes across the country and Europe, as he travelled in the summer for inspiration and painted in the winter.

By the early 19th century, he was a household name, admired for his epic depictions of British harbors, mythological scenes, and architectural landmarks. But it was his embrace of the previously unfashionable landscape that would leave the greatest artistic footprint, as he took early influence from the likes of Willem van de Velde, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin.

This was the start of a career that spanned more than six decades and culminated with a push toward abstraction and an obsession with the elemental forces of nature, often in harbor scenes. Referred to as The Painter of Light, Turner’s work evolved from the precise topographical tradition of the 18th century towards something entirely new and abstract. His seascapes churned with drama and his skies radiated with a golden intensity, much to the delight of Claude Monetand Mark Rothko would praise and emulate. In fact, When Turner was given one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, the similarly color obsessed Rothko quipped, “that chap Turner learned a lot from me”.

Turner’s art evolved to blend technique with emotion, realism with suggestion to produce landscapes filled with emotion, like The Fighting Temeraire (1839), which was voted the winner of the Greatest Painting in Britain Poll in 2005, while Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) stands as a precursor to Impressionism and Modernism, despite initially being mocked for its apparent chaos. A typical verdict of the day was expressed by the art critic William Makepeace Thackeray, who in 1839 described Turner’s paintings as, “for the most part quite incomprehensible to me”.

The Emotional Power of Color

Color was an emotional tool for Turner. Cool greys and blues in his art suggest melancholy or vastness, as in Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842), where sea and sky swirl in an imposing vortex. While at the other end of the palette, warm golds, oranges, and reds, like those in Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight (1835) carry a haunting beauty.

Often abandoning realistic lighting in favor of expressive chromatic atmospheres, Turner’s harbors at sunset or sunrise burned with a spiritual intensity, as they seemingly dissolved into pure sensation. And the sea proved to be one of the most evocative themes in Turner’s art. Not only depicting the ocean, but the ships that sailed on it, the harbors, and human life on the seas, Turner’s maritime scenes are not only records of nautical life, but the emotion of the landscape, enhanced by light and color.

And it was in the mouths of harbors that Turner discovered his theatre of emotion. In works like Dutch Boats in a Gale (1801), the ships leans into the wind and battles the sea, the water reflecting a sky in flux, showing the fragility of man against nature, while The Harbour of Dieppe (1826–27) is a threshold between safety and that danger, life and loss.

Perhaps the pinnacle of this masterclass in color and feeling is The Fighting Temeraire Tugged To Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up (1839), to give it its full name. Depicting an aging warship, once glorious at the Battle of Trafalgar being towed up the River Thames by a modern steam tug to a ship-breaker’s yard, Turner’s blazing orange sky fades into pale yellows and silvers to mirror the ship’s redundance at the dawn of a new industrial era – transforming a historical moment into a reflection on mortality.

From Narrative to Abstraction

As Turner aged his art evolved. The ship and harbor paintings remained but they began to abandon a clear visual structure and moved closer to abstraction. In works like Sunrise with Sea Monsters (1845), vessels become little more than silhouettes or colour masses, overwhelmed by boiling clouds and liquid light. The footprints of Impressionism are clear. Similarly, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (exhibited 1843) is an explosion of expressive light and warm color depicting the biblical scene.

Watercolour was the natural medium for Turner’s radical approach thanks to its inherent fluidity, but he was an experimenter who also achieved the same effects with oil paint by applying it in thin layers. His painting of Norham Castle, Sunrise (1845) is enveloped in dawn light, while the castle in Northumberland, England, all but disappears in a sea of light. “Light is therefore color,” said Turner in an 1818 lecture.

These scenes are symphonies of pigment and feeling, unmoored from classical perspective. As much as they represent physical landscapes, they’re also emotional representations that predate the techniques of Impressionists and Abstract Expressionists, as Turner invites the viewer not only to see, but to feel the shimmering colours and dissolving forms.

Two and a Half Centuries Later

Turner is Britain’s greatest artist. A colossus of productivity, he adorns the £20 note, his paintings top public polls, and the country’s most prestigious art prize is in his name. And he achieved this by stepping outside the artistic norm and challenging artistic convention with his pioneering embrace of abstraction. He was a tireless painter and similarly determined in his experimentation, as he played with new materials and pigments to leave a rich legacy that included over 500 paintings held at Tate Britain, with several important works held by the National Gallery in London.

And 250 years after his birth, Turner’s legacy will be commemorated with a year-long festival of special exhibitions and events at Tate Britain museum, while Christie’s will host The Old Masters Evening Sale on 1 July 2025 in London, proving his legacy shows no signs of growing old.

Turner’s legacy can be seen in his representation of the Industrial Revolution and impressionistic view of nature that express swirling amotion in a pioneering early example of abstract painting, which would greatly influence French Impressionists later in the century.

But perhaps the most fitting tribute to Turner is to stare at one of his scenes and feel the sea in turmoil, let the color wash over you, and absorb the essence of perception itself. At a time when figurative paintings was the norm, Turner ushered in paintings capable of arousing the senses and challenging the mind and the norm, as impressionistic colors blended to create pieces reflecting history and politics. As Turner once said, “my job is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.” And two and a half centuries later and we’re still reveling in seeing the world through his eyes.