A child prodigy, Joseph Mallord William Turner was accepted into the Royal Academy of Art in Piccadilly, London, at the tender age of 14. A year later, Turner exhibited his first watercolor painting, A View of the Archbishop’s Palace, at the academy’s Summer Exhibition. Notoriously morose and eccentric as an adult, Turner’s moody watercolor paintings often depicted scenes of the tempestuous sea: shipwrecks, storms, gales, deluges of rain. A new exhibition puts Turner in dialogue with his contemporaries and rivals, the painters Thomas Girtin and John Sell Cotman, whose experiments in watercolor, along with Turner’s own, elevated the medium to high art. —Paulina Prosnitz