Romantic Images Picture Biography
Source (google.com.pk)Turner was absolutely among the artists we now classify as Romantics, but he had one foot squarely in what would come to be known as Impressionism. It became routine for him, during his lifetime, to be lampooned by critics for his "unintelligible chaos of color," "yellow fever" and seas that looked " ... like soap and
chalk." (Thank goodness neither Turner nor the Impressionists who so admired his work cared much about the opinions of art critics.)
Date and Place of Birth:
April 23, 1775, Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, England
There is no record of Turner's actual date of birth, which was sometime between late April and early May of 1775. The artist himself chose April 23 as the best candidate, possibly because it is also St. George's Day (patron saint of England, among many other places and organizations) and the birthday of William Shakespeare.
(In case you were wondering, "J. M. W." stands for "Joseph Mallord William," which is quite a mouthful and shines a rather helpful, thoughtful light on the much shorter "J. M. W.")
Life:
The son of a wig-maker and his mentally unstable spouse, young Turner spent little time in his parents' home and much with various relatives. At age 14, his intellect, precocious talent for drawing and (understandably) high ambitions to enjoy a comfortable life led him to the Royal Academy Schools, where his first exhibition was held in 1790. Though all of his early works were watercolor landscapes, he was painting in oils by 1796 and became a full member of the Royal Academy in 1802.
Having been trained academically, Turner seemed to spend the rest of his life developing an ever more loose style. He relentlessly studied nature and light (often traveling abroad to do so) and kept boiling these down to their most basic forms. He had a phenomenal output of drawings and paintings, and was not always keen to sell these. (He was known to track down and repurchase previously sold works.) Upon his death, he left nearly 30,000 pieces of his work to the British Nation.
We know next to nothing about Turner's personal life as he guarded his privacy and was nearly anti-social. Though he never married, he did have mistresses and almost certainly fathered children. The few people to enjoy close relationships with him were mainly fellow Academians with whom he fished. Conversely, he was an astute businessman who understood a public persona needed to be maintained, in order for Turner, the Artist, to continue to command both his price and pick of commissions.
Little can be said of J.M.W. Turner that hasn't already been said elsewhere and at length. His reputation as one of the, if not the, most important British painters - ever - is both deserved and justifiable. Landscape and maritime art were accorded respect due almost singlehandedly to his work. He remains a towering figure in British art (more popular than ever, 150+ years after his death) and, in retrospect, a visionary who bridged the gap between "traditional" art and Modernism.
Echinoderms (Echinodermata) are a group of marine invertebrates that includes star fish, sea lilies, feather stars, brittle stars, sea cucumbers and sea urchins. There are about 6000 species of echinoderms alive today. Most echinoderms are bottom-dwelling animals that exhibit a variety of feeding habits including filter feeding, scavenging and predation. Present-day echinoderms are free-moving, but they evolved from sessile ancestors.
Echinoderms have an endoskeleton composed of calcareous ossicles. In sea stars and brittle stars, the ossicles articulate to form flexible structures. In sea urchins and sand dollars, the ossicles are fused together to form a rigid skeletal structure known as a test.
Echinoderms exhibit a type of radial symmetry called pentamerous symmetry in which their body can be divided into five equal parts around a central axis. Echinoderms developed this symmetry after they had already diverged from their bilaterally symmetrical ancestors. For this reason, the radial symmetry in echinoderms does not imply they are closely related to other organisms with radial symmetry such as cnidarians.
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