Solkin, David (editor) — Turner and the Masters

London, Tate Publishing, 2009. First. Softbound. Color illustrated wraps, 240pp, 103 color plates, numerous figures. From the publisher--It was J.M.W. Turner's strategy - uniquely within the history of European landscape painting - to take on all comers, both past and present, whom he considered as worthy rivals to his own fame. Throughout his career he modelled some of his most ambitious pictures on the works of other painters, to demonstrate both his understanding of great art and his ability to equal - indeed to surpass - the masters of the past. Turner never tired of matching his talents against the forerunners and contemporaries he most admired, even as he devoted more and more of his energy to devising his own, defiantly innovative forms of modern pictorial imagery. In the process he fashioned a type of art that not only strove to be true to the appearances of nature, but that was also self-consciously about the making of art itself. VG, slight wear to corners and edges .