PARIS.- The British landscapist J.M.W. Turner
(1775-1851) was highly unusual in that he responded to the works of the old
Masters and his contemporaries throughout his lengthy career. This
often anxious, pernickety, deliberately competitive but always fertile exchange
was an integral part of his work as a painter. Turner emerged in the mid-1790s
as a particularly gifted and ambitious watercolourist, rivalling his greatest
contemporaries (including his friend Thomas Girton (1775-1802)) but also eager
to improve his painting technique by studying the Welsh landscapist Richard
Wilson (1713-1782) and visiting private collections. In the absence of museums,
the early British collections gave him access to the old masters he sought to
equal. On view through 23 May, 2010.