After London and Before Madrid, the Grand Palais in Paris Welcomes Turner and the Masters
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. As a young man he was moved to tears by one of Claude Lorrain’s paintings (1600-1682), despairing that he would ever do as well. But his work did not go unnoticed and he exhibited at the Royal Academy at an early age, readily emulating contem