Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851 An English landscape painter was the foremost English romantic painter and the most original of English landscape artists in watercolour. The son of a barber, he received almost no general education but at 14 was already a student at the Royal Academy of Arts and three years later was making topographical drawings for magazines. In 1791 for the first time he exhibited two watercolours at the Royal Academy. In the following 10 years he exhibited there regularly, was elected a member (1802), and was made professor of perspective (1807). By 1799 the sale of his work had freed him from drudgery and he devoted himself to the visionary interpretations of landscape for which he became famous.
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In 1802, Turner made a trip to the Continent where he painted his famous Calais Pier (National Gall., London). From then on he travelled constantly in England or abroad, making innumerable direct sketches from which he drew material for his studio paintings in oil and watercolour. Turner showed a remarkable ability to distil the best from the tradition of landscape painting and he helped to further elevate landscape (and seascape) as important artistic subject matter. Turner went even further than the impressionists later in abstracting light and colour from his vision of nature but unlike them he was principally interested in capturing transient effects under different conditions. He relied on a prodigious and highly trained visual memory in addition to his sketches. A Mrs. Simon recorded that during a rainstorm in 1843 he put his head out of a train window for nearly 9 minutes and shut his eyes in intense concentration for a quarter of an hour. As he grew older Turner became more eccentric. He had few close friends except for his father who lived with him for thirty years, eventually working as his studio assistant. His father died in 1829, which had a profound effect on him, and thereafter he was subject to bouts of depression.
Turner was commercially astute. Despite regular arguments with engravers and publishers over terms, he fostered a school of steel-plate engravers who made his work known through high quality popular ‘annual’ publications based on watercolours derived from his tours in Britain and abroad. For his original work, in oil and watercolour, he built up a following of discerning and wealthy patrons, many from the new industrial and commercial classes in late-Georgian and early Victorian Britain, and inspired a generation of artistic followers. Even those and there were many who considered the man and his work perplexing or eccentric recognized him as unique, and though he was in no sense a conventional ‘marine artist’ he was the greatest painter of seascapes, landscapes and weather effects of his age. His reputation in later life owed much to John Ruskin, the greatest art critic of their day, whom he met in 1840 and whose ‘Modern Painters’ (1843–60) was founded on justification of Turner. Turner was a great supporter of the Royal Academy but while animated and sociable in artistic company was otherwise somewhat secretive, guarding his privacy. Though he had an increasingly derelict house and private gallery in Queen Anne Street, Westminster, he died in the care of his long-time housekeeper and mistress, Mrs Sophia Booth, in their cottage on Chelsea embankment, leaving his works to the nation (primarily Tate, London).
Turner was commercially astute. Despite regular arguments with engravers and publishers over terms, he fostered a school of steel-plate engravers who made his work known through high quality popular ‘annual’ publications based on watercolours derived from his tours in Britain and abroad. For his original work, in oil and watercolour, he built up a following of discerning and wealthy patrons, many from the new industrial and commercial classes in late-Georgian and early Victorian Britain, and inspired a generation of artistic followers. Even those and there were many who considered the man and his work perplexing or eccentric recognized him as unique, and though he was in no sense a conventional ‘marine artist’ he was the greatest painter of seascapes, landscapes and weather effects of his age. His reputation in later life owed much to John Ruskin, the greatest art critic of their day, whom he met in 1840 and whose ‘Modern Painters’ (1843–60) was founded on justification of Turner. Turner was a great supporter of the Royal Academy but while animated and sociable in artistic company was otherwise somewhat secretive, guarding his privacy. Though he had an increasingly derelict house and private gallery in Queen Anne Street, Westminster, he died in the care of his long-time housekeeper and mistress, Mrs Sophia Booth, in their cottage on Chelsea embankment, leaving his works to the nation (primarily Tate, London).Turner died on Dec. 19, 1851, and was buried as a national hero in St. Paul's Cathedral. He left a fortune of more than £140.000 to found a charity for "Decayed Artists" and a vast hoard of sketches and his finest paintings many of which he had bought back to leave to the nation. But his will was faultily drafted, and it was successfully contested by distant and probably disliked relatives. Only the paintings reached the destination he had intended, and the greatest of them are on permanent display in the Tate Gallery, London. At his request he was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral Turner left a large fortune that he hoped would be used to support what he called "decaying artists." His collection of paintings was bequeathed to his country.
