| By :
Martin Hofschroer
Art materials firm Daler-Rowney is responsible for helping the career of romantic painter J.M.W. Turner. The English landscape artist was supplied with art materials by The Rowney Company, an early incarnation of Daler-Rowney, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Turner was a family friend of Richard and Thomas Rowney, the two brothers who founded The Rowney Company, and later appointed the firm as official lithographers, a method of printing artwork onto paper or other suitable art materials. The son of a barber and wig maker, Turner created drawings from an early age which his father would exhibit in his shop window and the artist would later enter the Royal Academy of Art aged only 14 years old. Turner is regarded as the person who developed landscape painting as an art form and is also known as one of the greatest masters of British watercolour landscape painting thanks to his famous depictions of English locations. The artist's work is thought of as a Romantic precursor to Impressionism and Turner was often criticised for creating paintings which contained factual inaccuracies and unintelligible objects. He once told a young artist: "What you do not know yet, at your age...is that you ought to paint your impressions. I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like." Turner became a full member of the Royal Academy in 1802 and was prolific during his life, leaving nearly 30,000 pieces of his work to the British Nation upon his death in 1851. Just before he died Turner is reported to have said: "It is through these eyes, closed forever at the bottom of the tomb, that generations as yet unborn will see nature." A crowd of people attended Turner's funeral at St Paul's Cathedral, where he was buried at his request, and the artist lies next to Sir Joshua Reynolds. There is statue of Turner at St Paul's Cathedral as well as the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts. The artist has left a lasting legacy in Britain as in 1984 a prestigious annual art award, the Turner Prize was named in his honour and the Winsor & Newton Turner Watercolour Award would follow later. A survey organised by the BBC in 2005 discovered that Turner's "The Fighting Temeraire" was Britain's "greatest painting" and in 2010 "Modern Rome -Campo Vaccino" was bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum at auction for $44.9 million.
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