2. Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775–19
December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape
painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was
considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now
regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an
eminence rivalling history painting. Although renowned for
his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of
British watercolour landscape painting. He is commonly
known as "the painter of light" and his work is regarded as a
Romantic preface to Impressionism.
Turner was born in Maiden Lane, Covent
Garden, London, England. His father, William Turner
(1738–7 August 1829), was a barber and wig maker. His
mother, Mary Marshall, became increasingly mentally
unstable, possibly due in part to the early death of Turner's
younger sister, Mary Ann Turner, in 1786. Mary Marshall
died in 1804, after having been committed in 1799 to St
Self-Portrait at the Age of Sixteen
Luke's Hospital and then to the Bethlem Royal Hospital, a
mental asylum otherwise known as "Bedlam".
3. Possibly due to the load placed on the family by these problems, the young Turner was sent to
stay with his maternal uncle, Joseph Mallord William Marshall, in Brentford in 1785, which was
then a small town west of London on the banks of the River Thames.
It was here that he first expressed an interest
in painting. A year later he attended a school
in Margate on the north-east Kent coast. By
this time he had created many
drawings, which his father exhibited in his
shop window.
He entered the Royal Academy of Art
schools in 1789, when he was only 14 years
old, and was accepted into the academy a year
later. Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the
Royal Academy, chaired the panel that
admitted him. At first Turner showed a keen
interest in architecture but was advised to Warkworth Castle, Northumberland - Thunder Storm
continue painting by the architect Approaching at Sun-Set. 1799
Thomas Hardwick (junior). A watercolour by Turner was accepted for the Summer Exhibition of 1790
after only one year's study. He exhibited his first oil painting in 1796, Fishermen at Sea, and thereafter
exhibited at the academy nearly every year for the rest of his life.
4. Turner travelled widely in Europe, starting with France and Switzerland in 1802 and studying
in the Louvre in Paris in the same year. He also made many visits to Venice. On a visit to Lyme
Regis, in Dorset, England, he painted a
stormy scene (now in the Cincinnati Art
Museum).
Important support for his work also
came from Walter Ramsden Fawkes, of
Farnley Hall, near Otley in
Yorkshire, who became a close friend of
the artist. Turner first visited Otley in
1797, aged 22, when commissioned to
paint watercolours of the area. He was so
attracted to Otley and the surrounding
area that he returned to it throughout his
career. The stormy backdrop of Hannibal
Crossing The Alps is reputed to have been
London. 1809. inspired by a storm over Otley's Chevin
while Turner was staying at Farnley
Hall.
5. Turner was also a frequent guest of George
O'Brien Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont at
Petworth House in West Sussex and painted
scenes that Egremont funded taken from the
grounds of the house and of the Sussex
countryside, including a view of the Chichester
Canal. Petworth House still displays a number of
paintings.
Turner's talent was recognized early in his life.
Financial independence allowed Turner to
innovate freely; his mature work is characterized
by a chromatic palette and broadly applied
atmospheric washes of paint. According to David
Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his later
pictures were called "fantastic puzzles."
However, Turner was still recognized as an
artistic genius: the influential English art critic
John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who
could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the
moods of Nature." Crossing the Brook. 1815.
6. Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires
(such as the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner rushed to witness first-hand,
and which he transcribed in a
series of watercolour
sketches), natural
catastrophes, and natural
phenomena such as
sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He
was fascinated by the violent
power of the sea, as seen in Dawn
after the Wreck (1840) and The
Slave Ship (1840).
Turner's major venture into
printmaking was the Liber
Studiorum (Book of Studies), a set
of seventy prints that the artist
worked on from 1806 to 1819. The
The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire. 1817.
Liber Studiorum was an expression
of his intentions for landscape art.
7. Loosely based on Claude Lorrain's Liber Veritatis (Book of Truth), the plates were meant to be
widely disseminated, and categorized the genre into six types:
Marine, Mountainous, Pastoral, Historical, Architectural, and Elevated or Epic Pastoral. His
printmaking was a major part of his output, and a whole museum is devoted to it, the Turner
Museum in Sarasota, Florida, founded in 1974 by Douglass Montrose-Graem to house his collection
of Turner prints.
Rome, from the Vatican, Raffaelle, Accompanied by La
Fornarina, Preparing His Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia.
1820.
8. Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on
the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the
foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other
hand. 'Sublime' here means
awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a
natural world unmastered by
man, evidence of the power of God–
a theme that artists and poets were
exploring in this period. The
significance of light was to Turner
the emanation of God's spirit and
this was why he refined the subject
matter of his later paintings by
leaving out solid objects and
detail, concentrating on the play of
light on water, the radiance of skies Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 1823.
and fires.
Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French
school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily
to optical phenomena.
9. His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape.
However, in Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power
of nature had already come into play.
His distinctive style of painting, in
which he used watercolour technique
with oil paints, created
lightness, fluency, and ephemeral
atmospheric effects.
One popular story about
Turner, though it likely has little
basis in reality, states that he even
had himself "tied to the mast of a
ship in order to experience the drama"
of the elements during a storm at
sea.
In his later years he used oils ever
Rivaulx Abbey, Yorkshire. c. 1825. more transparently, and turned to an
evocation of almost pure light by use
of shimmering colour.
10. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western
Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable.
The intensity of hue and interest
in evanescent light not only
placed Turner's work in the
vanguard of English painting, but
later exerted an influence upon art
in France, as well; the
Impressionists, particularly
Claude Monet, carefully studied
his techniques.
High levels of ash in the
atmosphere during 1816 the "Year
Without a Summer", led to
unusually spectacular sunsets
during this period, and were an
inspiration for some of Turner's
work.
Mortlake Terrace Early Summer Morning. c. 1826.
11. John Ruskin says in his "Notes"
on Turner in March 1878, that
an early patron, Dr Thomas
Monro, the Principal Physician
of Bedlam, was a significant
influence on Turner's style:
His true master was Dr
Monro; to the practical
teaching of that first patron
and the wise simplicity of
method of watercolour
study, in which he was
disciplined by him and
companioned by Giston, the
healthy and constant
development of the greater
Alnwick Castle, Northumberland. c.1825-1828. power is primarily to be
attributed; the greatness of the
power itself, it is impossible to
over-estimate.
12. On one of his trips to Europe he met the Irish physician Robert James Graves. Graves was
travelling in a diligence in the Alps when a man who looked like the mate of a ship got in, sat
beside him, and soon took from his
pocket a note-book across which his
hand from time to time passed with
the rapidity of lightning. Graves
wondered if the man was insane, he
looked, saw that the stranger had been
noting the forms of clouds as they
passed and that he was no common
artist. The two travelled and sketched
together for months. Graves tells that
Turner would outline a scene, sit doing
nothing for two or three days, then
suddenly, "perhaps on the third day he
would exclaim 'there it is', and seizing
his colours work rapidly till he had Cowes, Isle of Wight. c.1827.
noted down the peculiar effect he
wished to fix in his memory."
13. The first American to buy a Turner
painting was James Lenox of New York
City, a private collector. Lenox wished to
own a Turner and in 1845 bought one
unseen through an intermediary, his friend
C. R. Leslie. From among the paintings
Turner had on hand and was willing to sell
for £500, Leslie selected and shipped the
1832 atmospheric seascape Staffa, Fingal's
Cave. Worried about the painting's
reception by Lenox, who knew Turner's
work only through his etchings, Leslie
wrote Lenox that the quality of Staffa, "a
Carisbrook Castle, Isle of Wight. c.1828. most poetic picture of a steam boat" would
become apparent in time. Upon receiving
the painting Lenox was baffled, and "greatly disappointed" by what he called the painting's
"indistinctness". When Leslie was forced to relay this opinion to Turner, Turner said "You should tell
Mr. Lenox that indistinctness is my forte." Staffa, Fingal's Cave is currently owned by the Yale
Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
14. As he grew older, Turner became more eccentric. He had few close friends except for his
father, who lived with him for 30 years, eventually working as his studio assistant. His father's
death in 1829 had a profound effect on him, and thereafter he was subject to bouts of depression.
He never married but had a relationship with an older widow, Sarah Danby. He is believed to have
been the father of her two daughters born in 1801 and 1811.
Chichester Canal. c.1828.
15. He died in the house of his mistress Sophia Caroline Booth in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea on 19 December
1851. He is said to have uttered the last words "The sun is God" before expiring. At his request he was
buried in St Paul's Cathedral, where he
lies next to Sir Joshua Reynolds. His
last exhibition at the Royal Academy
was in 1850.
The architect Philip Hardwick
(1792–1870) who was a friend of
Turner's and also the son of the artist's
tutor, Thomas Hardwick, was in charge
of making his funeral arrangements and
wrote to those who knew Turner to tell
them at the time of his death
that, "I must inform you, we have lost
him." Other active executors were his
Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace and Custom-
cousin and executor, and chief mourner House, Venice: Canaletti Painting. 1833.
at the funeral, Henry Harpur IV
(benefactor of Westminster - now Chelsea & Westminster - Hospital), Revd. Henry Scott
Trimmer, George Jones RA and Charles Turner ARA.
16. Turner left a small fortune which he hoped would be used to support what he called "decayed artists".
He planned and designed an almshouse for them at Twickenham with a gallery for some of his works.
His will was contested and in
1856, after a court battle, part of
his fortune was awarded to his
first cousins including Thomas
Price Turner. Another portion of
the money went to the Royal
Academy of Arts, which does not
now use it for this purpose, though
occasionally it awards students the
Turner Medal. His collection of
finished paintings was bequeathed
to the British nation, and he
intended that a special gallery
would be built to house them. This
did not come to pass owing to a
The Grand Canal, Venice. 1835. failure to agree on a site, and then
to the parsimony of British
governments.
17. Twenty-two years after his death, the British Parliament passed an Act allowing his paintings to
be lent to museums outside London, and so began the process of scattering the pictures which Turner
had wanted to be kept together.
In 1910 the main part of the Turner
Bequest, which includes unfinished
paintings and drawings, was
rehoused in the Duveen Turner
Wing at the Tate Gallery. In 1987
a new wing of the Tate, the Clore
Gallery, was opened specifically to
house the Turner bequest, though
some of the most important
paintings in it remain in the
National Gallery in contravention
of Turner's condition that the
finished pictures be kept and shown
together. Increasingly paintings are
lent abroad, ignoring Turner's
Flint Castle. 1838.
provision that they be kept
"constantly" in Turner's Gallery.
18. On July 7, 2010, Turner's final
painting of Rome, ―Modern Rome
— Campo Vaccino‖, from 1839, was
bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum
at a Sotheby’s auction in London for
$44.9 million.
In January 2011 The Painter, a
biographical play on his life by
Rebecca Lenkiewicz, premiered at
the Arcola Theatre in London.
Between 1 October 2007 and 21
September 2008, the first major
exhibit of Turner's works in the
United States in over forty years
came to the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York, the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, and the
The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be
Broken up. 1838. Dallas Museum of Art. It included
over 140 paintings, more than half
of which were from the Tate.
19. The "Turner and his painters" exhibition (Tate Britain, London, 23 September 2009 to 31 January
2010, Paris, Grand Palais, 22 February to 24 May 2010) retraces and illustrates the development of
Turner's very personal vision, through the many chance or deliberate, but always opportune and
enriching interaction that
influenced his remarkable career.
Nearly 100 paintings and other
graphic works (studies and
engravings) from major British and
American collections, as well as the
Louvre and the Prado will be on
show.
On July 7, 2010, Turner's final
painting of Rome, ―Modern Rome
— Campo Vaccino‖, from
1839, was bought by the J. Paul
Getty Museum at a Sotheby’s
auction in London for
$44.9 million. In January 2011
The Painter, a biographical play on
his life by Rebecca Ancient Rome; Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of
Lenkiewicz, premiered at the Germanicus. 1839.
Arcola Theatre in London.
20.
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Created By
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