Andrew Wilton

Andrew Wilton has written extensively on aspects of Romantic landscape, especially on J.M.W.Turner and on watercolour.

He has occupied curatorial positions at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, the British Museum and the Tate Gallery. He was founding curator of Prints and Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art, and Curator of the Turner Collection in the Clore Gallery from its opening until 1989, when he became Keeper of the British Collection at the Tate Gallery. He is now Visiting Research Fellow at the Tate.

His books include TURNER AND SWITZERLAND (with John Russell, (1976), BRITISH WATERCOLOURS 1750 TO 1850 (1997), J.M.W.TURNER: HIS LIFE AN ART (1979), TURNER IN HIS TIME (1987) and FIVE CENTURIES OF BRITISH PAINTING (2002).

He has participated in the organisation and cataloguing of many important exhibitions, including the Turner Bicentenary Exhibition at the Royal Academy (1974-5) with Martin Butlin and John Gage, and its companion show, 'Turner in the British Museum'(1975); the Turner exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris (1984) with Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, 'The Great Age of British Watercolours' at the Royal Academy, London, in 1992 (with Anne Lyles), and 'The Swagger Portrait' (Tate Gallery, 1992).

He edited GRAND TOUR (1996) with Ilaria Bignamini, SYMBOLISM IN BRITAIN (1997) with Robert Upstone, and J.M.WILLIAM TURNER: LICHT UND FARBE a major retrospective at the Folkwang Museum, Essen, and the Kunsthaus, Zurich, in 2001-2.

In 2002 he co-organised (with Tim Barringer, 2002) 'American Sublime', the first major survey of nineteenth-century American landscape to be seen in Britain. It subsequently travelled to the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The catalogue won the AXA-Art Newspaper Award and the Henry-Russell Hitchcock Prize.

This book looks at Turner's practice of drawing in various media (pen, pencil and chalk as well as watercolour and oil paint), an aspect of Turner's work which has hitherto received very little attention.

Andrew Wilton shows that, while Turner's art has always been celebrated for its atmospheric breadth and freedom of handling, he based his working procedures throughout his career on the discipline of drawing in outline, which was an essential element in the grand strategy by which he achieved his formidable results.

An important section of the book is devoted to the vexed question of Turner's drawing of the human figure, and the crucial role played by the figure both in his conception of landscape and in his ambitious attempts to master all the genres of fashionable contemporary art.