Joseph Mallord William Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner, also known as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and draftsman. He was born in 1775 in Maiden Lane and died on 19 December 1851 at Cheyne Walk.

He is counted among the greatest British painters of the nineteenth century. Turner was a landscape painter. His expressive treatment of light and atmosphere and his bold use of color in landscape painting inspired the early Impressionists Monet and Pissarro. His work belongs to Romanticism and to the tradition of English painting, and he also worked as an illustrator and an architectural draftsman.

Among his best-known paintings are The Fighting Temeraire, Fishermen at Sea, The Battle of Trafalgar, Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, The Slave Ship, Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, Calais Pier and The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons. His work is held by many collections, among them Tate, the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Yale Center for British Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Valley of Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche, and Thunderstorm, the painting shown here, is oil on canvas and dates from 1836–37. It was painted in England. Its title names a snowstorm, an avalanche and a thunderstorm in the Aosta valley, and the scene includes rocks, snow, figures among them women and children, and a dog.

The canvas measures 92.2 by 123 centimeters. It is part of the Frederick T. Haskell Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago and belongs to the museum’s Painting and Sculpture of Europe department.