Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 - 1851) was an English Romanticist landscape painter and is considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting.  Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolor landscape painting. He is commonly known as "the painter of light" and his work is regarded as a Romantic preface to Impressionism.