By today’s measure, Joseph Mallord William Turner is often seen as the most accomplished and national favorite among all of the artists of Great Britain. Seen as an artist whose style was far before his time, the paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner are a masterful rendition of light and colors in a way that is an evident precursor to the later Impressionist style which would develop and become popular in France many years later. Turner was born in Covent Garden in 1775 to a father who was a barber and wig-maker so most of his early artistic experiences were self-taught initially. Later, in 1789 Turner did begin studies at the Royal Academy. He never married, though he did have two illegitimate daughters by one of his housemaids. The quality of art that came to be the most synonymous with the works of Turner was the emphasis on the portrayal of light: whether sunlight, candlelight, or moonlight, or even reflections of it in other objects. During his career, Turner produced a huge quantity of work including over a thousand watercolors, over five-hundred oil paintings, and about nineteen-thousand sketches and studies primarily from his three-hundred sketchbooks which he always filled on his summer travels around Europe. Though almost all Joseph Mallord Turner oil paintings and other artwork is classified as landscape, he had a system of sub-categorization consisting of the following categories based on the specific subject matter: architectural, historical, marine, mountainous, pastoral, and elevated pastoral. This system of categorization was important simply due to the huge number of works he completed during his career. Critics of the paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner who dislike his work often cite his inability to innovate with regards to the subject matter of his paintings. It is true that Joseph Mallord William Turner paintings almost always display familiar scenes in washes of light and color in either watercolor or oils, but rarely depict some of the scenes from his travels, such as Italy, unless another artist had found success with those subjects first. In this way, it is obvious that some of the oil paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner avoided risks and stayed with his attempts to elevate British landscape painting to a more respected genre of art and painting. Despite some critics’ dislike of Turner, one of the most famous critics of the era, John Ruskin consistently praised his work through out both of their careers. Ruskin defended Joseph Mallord William Turner artwork to other critics and even published articles and several books about the superiority of it to many of his contemporaries. Joseph Mallord William Turner artwork possesses a special place in the art of many British art-lovers and some of his most significant works are the following: The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up, Glaucus and Scylla, The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of Victory, The Burning Houses of Lords and Commons, and Slave Ship.