J.M.W.Turner is numbered among those artists granted a long period of creativity. He worked tirelessly for over sixty years; his estate alone embraced more than 19,000 drawings and colour sketches, while the range of his output, covers a broad span. It is only with difficulty that we can identify the pages produced by the young artist around 1790 - the closing years of the Rococo - as the work of the artist from whom would come the brilliant, free weaving ofcolour found in the pictures paint ed in the 1840s. Not until his later works did he find a style of painting all his own, a vision of nature hitherto impossible. Even today, his later pictures can give the observer a sense of seeing the world for the first time - a world ofcolour and light.
……