Perhaps the most celebrated of all British artists, J. M. W. Turner [1] dominated landscape painting in this country for the first half of the 19th century and beyond. He was born the son of a barber at Maiden Lane in London's Covent Garden but spent much of his childhood with an uncle in Middlesex. Showing precocious artistic talent, he enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools from 1789. Although he started out as a watercolourist, Turner soon mastered oil painting with great success. During his career he travelled extensively throughout Britain as well as in France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, constantly searching for impressive scenery and dramatic subjects. Turner's prolific and highly influential output combined grand, historical and literary themes with innovative techniques exploring the transitory effects of light and movement.

In 1798 Turner was already canvassing support for his election as an Associate of the Academy. In October he visited the artist and diarist Joseph Farington, inviting him to choose a subject from his sketchbooks so that he could paint the scene as a present. Farington recorded that John Hoppner had already selected a 'subject at Durham' from Turner and this watercolour is thought to be the result [2]. It is based on a drawing in the 'Tweed and Lakes' sketchbook (Tate Britain) produced by Turner during his tour of North East England in 1797. Turner may have conferred with fellow watercolourist Thomas Girtin before setting out and there is certainly a striking resemblance between this view and Girtin's depiction of Durham painted in 1799 (now in the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester).

In November 1799 Turner was duly elected an ARA. Less than three years later, at the early age of just twenty six, he became a full Academician. The Diploma work that he presented to the institution was this imposing painting of Dolbadern Castle [3] in Wales. The impetus for this composition was a tour of North Wales in 1798-99 and the artist's response to the mountainous landscape foreshadows his later portrayal of Alpine scenery. His adherence to the aesthetic values of the 'Sublime' is clear in the painting and also in the verse he appended when the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1800:

How awful is the silence of the waste,
Where nature lifts her mountains to the sky.
Majestic solitude, behold the tower
Where hopeless OWEN, long imprison'd, pin'd,
And wrung his hands for liberty in vain.

These lines, possibly written by Turner, echo the terminology of theorists like Edmund Burke, who described the expressive power of 'awful silence', 'Vacuity, Darkness and Solitude'. The unfortunate 'Owen' is probably the Welsh prince Owain Goch ap Gruffyd who was imprisoned by his brother, Llewellyn the Last, in 1255. Turner depicted the tower in which Goch is said to have been held, silhouetted against the sky and hemmed in by swirling clouds and inhospitable crags.

Turner became the Academy's Professor of Perspective from 1811 but he is said to have voiced hopes of establishing a professorship of landscape painting. This never came to fruition but it may have influenced Turner's decision to continue work on his Liber Studiorum [4]. This series of mezzotints, modelled on Claude Lorrain's Liber Veritatis, was a hugely ambitious attempt to demonstrate the emotional range and expressive power of landscape. Although Turner did not complete the 100 published plates he originally promised, the project was a success that greatly increased his fame and influence.

In later years, Turner became known for submitting unfinished works to the Academy's annual exhibition, only completing them on Varnishing Day. The combination of his increasingly eccentric personality and his daringly experimental paintings led some members of the press to suggest that Turner was mad. However, John Ruskin's energetic defence of the artist's work in Modern Painters ensured Turner's illustrious reputation. Meeting his artistic hero in 1840, Ruskin wrote: 'Everybody had described him to me as coarse, boorish…and vulgar. This I knew to be impossible. I found in him a somewhat eccentric, keen-mannered...gentleman'.