Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775 – 19 December 1851), known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colouring, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings. His artistic style developed over his lifetime, moving away from Romanticism—bypassing the following rising style of Realism—and, instead, with his later works being a significant precursor of and presaging the later Impressionist and Abstract Art movements that arose in the decades after his death. He left behind more than 550 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolours, and 30,000 works on paper. He was championed by the leading English art critic John Ruskin from 1840, and is today regarded as having elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. In 1969 art historian Kenneth Clark wrote of Turner: "He was a genius of the first order—far the greatest painter that England has ever produced..."
Turner was born in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, to a modest lower-middle-class family and retained his lower-class accent, while assiduously avoiding the trappings of success and fame.