"The Sun is God." � JMW Turner

A biographical travelogue in 58 placemarks.

"The painter of light", "the great pyrotechnist", one of the finest landscape artists in English history, if not the best, Joseph Mallord William Turner produced more than 20,000 paintings and drawings in his lifetime, and his frequent rambles across Europe happen to make him a perfect subject for Google Earth.

JMW Turner was celebrated in his own time, and deluged with commissions, but he was also the Jackson Pollock of his day, scathingly reviled for "hurling soapsuds and whitewash" at canvases with a mop � even Queen Victoria thought him mad � and his foul temper and reclusiveness lost him many friends.

Just five foot four inches tall, he was nevertheless the artistic giant of the early 19th century. The heir of the classic traditions of European art produced many paintings considered overtly revolutionary. He portrayed the great themes of the era, but even in his monumental 1812 work "Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps", Hannibal and his men hardly figured at all. Turner's real subject, the obsession of his life, was light itself. Just as the great cultural flowering of Romanticism began, Turner was praised by the French impressionists, Monet, Pissarro, Degas and Renoir formally acknowledging "that [we] have been preceded in this path by a great master of the English, the illustrious Turner".

"All that is vital in modern art," the art critic Haldane Macfall wrote in 1920, "was born out of the revelation of Turner." He was, as has been noted often and with affection, the last of the Old Masters and the first of the New.

For best viewing results, turn off all layers except Terrain.

Among the many excellent websites on the man are the Tate Britain's and J-M-W-Turner.co.uk.
The Turner Society was founded in 1975 to "further the appreciation and understanding" of the artist, and the much younger Independent Turner Society is rather testily trying to get his damn museum built, as he requested in his will.

EDITED APRIL 2008: Thanks to Chris Ward for pointing out that my placemark for Farnley Hall in Yorkshire, the home of the Fawkes family where Turner several times stayed, was off by quite a few kilometres. The placemark, which had rested on a different Farnley Hall, belonging to the Danby family, has now journeyed northward.