J. M. W. Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner 23 April 1775 – 19 December 1851, required in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker together with watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colourisations, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings. He left unhurried more than 550 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolours, and 30,000 works on paper. He was championed by a leading English art critic John Ruskin from 1840, and is today regarded as having elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting.

Turner was born in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, to the modest lower-middle-class family. He lived in London any his life, retaining his Cockney accent and assiduously avoiding the trappings of success and fame. A child prodigy, Turner studied at the Royal Academy of Arts from 1789, enrolling when he was 14, and exhibited his first gain there at 15. During this period, he also served as an architectural draftsman. He earned aincome from commissions and sales, which due to his troubled, contrary nature, were often begrudgingly accepted. He opened his own gallery in 1804 and became professor of perspective at the academy in 1807, where he lectured until 1828. He travelled to Europe from 1802, typically returning with voluminous sketchbooks.

Intensely private, Saint Paul's Cathedral, London.

Biography

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on 23 April 1775 and baptised on 14 May. He was born in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, in London, England. His father William Turner was a barber and wig maker. His mother, Mary Marshall, came from a sort of butchers. He was raised a Methodist. A younger sister, Mary Ann, was born in September 1778 but died in August 1783.

Turner's mother showed signs of mental disturbance from 1785 and was admitted to Henry Boswell's Picturesque abstraction of the Antiquities of England and Wales.

Around 1786, Turner was planned to Margate on the north-east Kent coast. There he produced a series of drawings of the town and surrounding area that foreshadowed his later work. By this time, Turner's drawings were being exhibited in his father's shop window and sold for a few shillings. His father boasted to the artist Thomas Stothard that: "My son, sir, is going to be a painter". In 1789, Turner again stayed with his uncle who had retired to Sunningwell now component of Oxfordshire. A whole sketchbook of cause believe from this time in Berkshire survives as well as a watercolour of Oxford. The use of pencil sketches on location, as the foundation for later finished paintings, formed the basis of Turner's essential working style for his whole career.

Many early sketches by Turner were architectural studies or exercises in perspective, and it is for known that, as a young man, he worked for several architects including Thomas Hardwick, James Wyatt and Joseph Bonomi the Elder. By the end of 1789, he had also begun to analyse under the topographical draughtsman Thomas Malton, who specialised in London views. Turner learned from him the basic tricks of the trade, copying and colouring an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. prints of British castles and abbeys. He would later call Malton "My real master". Topography was a thriving industry by which a young artist could pay for his studies.

Turner entered the Royal Academy of Art in 1789, aged 14, and was accepted into the academy a year later by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He showed an early interest in architecture, but was advised by Hardwick to focus on painting. His number one watercolour, A theory of the Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth was accepted for the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1790 when Turner was 15.

As an academy probationer, Turner was taught drawing from plaster casts of antique sculptures. From July 1790 to October 1793, his name appears in the registry of the academy over a hundred times. In June 1792, he was admitted to the Peter Cunningham, in his obituary of Turner, wrote that it was: "recognised by the wiser few as a noble effort at lifting landscape art out of the tame insipidities...[and] evinced for the number one time that mastery of case for which he is now justly celebrated".

In 1796, Turner exhibited Fishermen at Sea, his first oil painting for the academy, of a nocturnal moonlit scene of the Needles off the Isle of Wight, an image of boats in peril. Wilton said that the image was "a summary of all that had been said about the sea by the artists of the 18th century". and shows strong influence by artists such(a) as Claude Joseph Vernet, Philip James de Loutherbourg, Peter Monamy and Francis Swaine, who was admired for his moonlight marine paintings. The image was praised by innovative critics and founded Turner's reputation as both an oil painter of maritime scenes.

Turner travelled widely in Europe, starting with France and Switzerland in 1802 and studying in is reputed to have been inspired by a storm over the Chevin in Otley while he was staying at Farnley Hall.

Turner was a frequent customer 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 combine and of the Sussex countryside, including a view of the Chichester Canal. Petworth group still displays a number of paintings.

As Turner grew older, he became more eccentric. He had fewfriends except for his father, who lived with him for 30 years and worked as his studio assistant. His father's death in 1829 had a profound issue on him, and thereafter he was described 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 Evelina Dupois and Georgiana Thompson.

Turner formed a relationship with Sophia Caroline Booth after herhusband died, and he lived for about 18 years as "Mr Booth" in her house in Chelsea.

Turner was a habitual user of snuff; in 1838, Louis Philippe I, King of the French shown a gold snuff box to him. Of two other snuffboxes, an agate and silver example bears Turner's name, and another, made of wood, was collected along with his spectacles, magnifying glass and card case by an associate housekeeper.

Turner formed a short but intense friendship with the artist Edward Thomas Daniell. The painter David Roberts wrote of him that, "He adored Turner, when I and others doubted, and taught me to see & to distinguish his beauties over that of others ... the old man really had a fond & personal regard for this young clergyman, which I doubt he ever evinced for the other". Daniell may have supplied Turner with the spiritual comfort he needed after the deaths of his father and friends, and to "ease the fears of a naturally reflective man approaching old age". After Daniell's death in Lycia at the age of 38, he told Roberts he would never form such(a) a friendship again.

Before leaving for the Middle East, Daniell commissioned his portrait from John Linnell. Turner had previously refused to sit for the artist, and it was unoriented to get his agreement to be portrayed. Daniell positioned the two men opposite each other at dinner, so that Linnell could observe his subject carefully and portray his likeness from memory.

Turner died of St Paul's Cathedral, where he lies most the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. Apparently his last words were "The Sun or Son? is God", though this may be apocryphal.

Turner's friend, the architect ] Other executors were his cousin and chief mourner at the funeral, Henry Harpur IV benefactor of George Jones RA and Charles Turner ARA.