Joseph Mallord William Turner was a barber's son. He was born in 1775 and grew up, as we know, to become one of England's greatest landscape painters. Described by his biographer, Wyllie, as "an uncouth old wizard with rough manners and a tender heart", he waxed increasingly eccentric as the years wore on and spent his declining years living under an assumed name in Chelsea. He died on December 19th, 1851, so today is the sesquicentenary of his death.
Turner was a mere stripling of a lad when he painted Buttermere Lake, with Part of Cromackwater - a Shower in the late 1790s and he had yet to adopt his unconventional and somewhat controversial later style. But a keen meteorological eye can be detected. The painting portrays a lakeland scene on a dark and sombre day, and is dominated by a perfect rainbow, the spectral colours of which are accurately portrayed.
Clearly visible outside the primary bow is the not uncommon secondary rainbow, and the scene also includes the much rarer phenomenon of a reflected rainbow, where a portion of the primary arc is reflected from the surface of the lake.
As time went by, however, Turner imbued nearly all his work with an exuberant, romantic turbulence, an idiosyncrasy which came to be widely recognised, and which, combined with his weakness for a long title, led Punch to suggest that he might consider painting A Typhoon Bursting over the Whirlpool of a Norwegian Maelstrom, with a Ship on Fire, an Eclipse, and a Pendant Lunar Rainbow.
He is remembered, too, for the vivid, almost lurid, quality of his later skies, as, for example, in the spectacular sunrise of Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, the clouded sunset in The Fighting Temeraire and the flaming yellow sky in The Arch of Constantine in Rome.
His colours became more extravagant as the 19th century progressed, reaching a yellowy-red climax in the 1830s and prompting one lady to remark to him: "I never see your skies in nature, Mr Turner." Turner's famous reply, "Then God help you, ma'am!", suggests that, as in the case of the rainbow, Turner may well have been just depicting what was there.
A series of volcanic eruptions in the first half of the 19th century threw vast quantities of volcanic dust into the stratosphere. Debris of this kind has the effect of filtering out the blue wavelengths from the light of the sun when it is near the horizon, allowing the colours red and orange to predominate much more than usual around dawn and sunset. This may, in part at any rate, explain the apparent eccentricity of William Turner's later style.