Art by J. M. W. Turner

Turner spent his career chasing light and weather in paint more than any recognizable subject, and his late work, increasingly loose, almost abstract seascapes and skies, was so far ahead of what 19th-century audiences expected that critics at the time frequently accused him of having lost his technical control rather than deliberately dissolving it. A persistent, likely embellished legend has him tying himself to a ship's mast during a storm just to study it firsthand for a painting. He kept much of his personal life deliberately private, reportedly using an alias, "Mr. Booth," to live discreetly with a companion later in life, a strange contrast to how openly experimental his paintings were becoming at the same time.