James Mallord William Turner has been termed England's greatest painters. In a career that spanned the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, he painted landscapes - luminous, mystic visions of nature - that forecast some of the most avant-garde of twentieth-century panting, frequently leaping beyond the Impressionists. The treatment of light in Turner's work, seen especially in the lemons, golds and rusts of his sunrises and sunsets or in the blues of his seas and mountains, has captivated generations of art lovers. This volume's forty-four colorplates and fifty black-and-while reproductions present a selection of the most significant and appealing oil paintings, watercolors, engravings, and drawings of Turner's lifework. The scenes range from England's seacoast, lake country, abbeys, and castles, to the Egypt of Biblical times and visions from Homers' Odyssey, and to the canals and piazzas of Venice, the peaks of the French and Swiss Alps, and fishing boats along the Dutch coast.