“Introduced today to the man who beyond all doubt is the greatest of the age; greatest in every faculty of the imagination, in every branch of scenic knowledge, at once the painter and poet of the day.” So wrote 21-year-old John Ruskin on meeting Turner in 1840.
Recognising Turner as so innovative, different from any painter before, that he demanded a new sort of writing about art, Ruskin championed his hero across five volumes in Modern Painters. In rich, allusive prose evocative of the artist’s spectacular atmospheric effects, he declared that by “truth of tone” and “truth of colour” Turner conveyed a truth deeper, in imaginative expression, than the most accomplished naturalism. This was the future of modern painting: subjective, visionary, sensational.