Turner?s landscapes are bold and impressionistic. He was the son of a barber, and taught himself to paint. He began by colouring architectural drawings and engravings,  and in 1789 was admitted as a student at the Royal Academy. There he met Girtin, Reynolds, Fuseli and Loutherbourg, and through them attained his imaginative and fantastic conception of landscape. He then did some research into optical light effects, and his investigations went even further than the famous experiments of the Impressionists. He traveled widely in Europe, visiting the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy in his search for picturesque sites and spectacular scenery. In 1870 Monet and Pissarro, who were then in London, discovered Turner's work. He had already worked with Bonington in 1820 and in 1835 had met Delacroix. Towards the end of his life he came to paint those , characteristic magical light effects, where his memory transfigured visual impressions into enchanting, fantastic hallucinations. Turner's development was deliberately slow. He liked to go back to places he had already known and painted, and treat them again in an increasingly abstract manner, allowing the play of light to give a symbolic value to the scene. This is why Symbolists such as Huysmans and Gustave Moreau, as well as the Impressionists, thought so much of Turner's painting, and used him justify their own theories about art. It  was through Ruskin and his writings that aesthetes such as Proust came to admire Turner so much. The painting Great Western, which had much impressed Monet and Pissarro, and represents a train rushing along at full speed,
was admired by Romantics, Impressionists and Symbolists alike. Theophile Gautier described it as 'The Beast in the Apocalypse, the steam-engine, opening its great red glassy eyes in the dark and hauling its long backbone of coaches like an enormous tail. I t is a wild demented picture where earth and sky are thrown into confusion together with furious brushstrokes-a strange extravagant picture, but the madman who painted it is a genius'.

Based on Phaidon encyclopedia of Impressionism, Maurice Serullaz, Phaidon, 1978