J. M. W. Turner

Biography

Childhood

Joseph Mallord William Turner said he was born on 23 April 1775 in Maiden Lane, in the working-class district of Covent Garden in London. The district was a busy commercial area where food, clothes, flowers and many other items could be bought – including night entertainment. The family moved to Hand Court, on the other side from Maiden Lane, when Turner was 5 years old.{{efn|"Maiden" Lane had tongue-in-cheek meaning due to the sex workers that waited for customers in this street. The Cider's Cellar, a well known brothel, operated across the street from the Turner's home.

Turner's father, William Turner, had a barbershop in the first floor. By the time Turner was 10, he proudly displayed his young son's drawings in the window, which he let customers view up close for one shilling. His father boasted to the artist Thomas Stothard that: "My son, sir, is going to be a painter". He would later retire as a barber to help his son in various taks in his studio and paint gallery. Turner was sent to different towns to attend elementary school, including Brentford, Margate, and Sunningwell (now part of Oxfordshire).

His mother, Mary Marshall, came from a family of butchers. She started to show symptoms of mental disorder and as they got worse, Turner's father was forced to place her in St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics. She was later moved to Bethlem Hospital, a mental asylum (commonly known as "bedlam"), where she died in 1804.

Adult life

The inspiration he found in the river Thames motivated him to occupy several second homes on or very near the river. The river allowed him to relax by fishing and boating, two of his favorite activities. He rented houses in Isleworth (1804-1806), Hammersmith, where he converted a boat into a floating studio (1807-1811), and in 1811 he bought a plot of land in Twickenham, in which he built a house he named Sandycombe Lodge. Since Turner's explorations of rough, mountainous terrain across England had made him a resilient walker, he regularly made the 10 mile journey on foot between Twickenham and his house and studio in London.

Turner never married and reportedly said: "I hate married men, they never make any sacrifice to the Arts, but are always thinking of their duty to their wives and families, or some rubbish of that sort.” From the beginning he kept his personal life separate from his professional activities. He had a discreet 12 year relationship with his housekeeper, the widow Sarah Danby, and is generally believed to have been the father of her two older daughters, Evelina (b. 1801) and Georgiana (b. 1811).

In his seventies, Turner formed a relationship with the widow Sophia Caroline Booth. He stayed with her under the pseudonym "Mr Booth" or "Admiral Booth" in her house at 6 Davis's Place (now Cheyne Walk) in Chelsea, where he died in 1851 at the age of 76.

Turner is buried in St Paul's Cathedral, where according to his wish, he lies near the painter and first president of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Bequest

In an unpredecented gesture, Turner bequeathed to the nation about 100 finished oil paintings as well as 200 unfinished canvases, over 19,000 sketches, drawings and watercolours and 200 sketchbooks. The fishished oil paintings were worth a small fortune, considering that they had been regularly purchased for no less than 200 and up to 450 guineas during his lifetime.

But aside from his unsold paintings, Turner died a rich man. His investments and properties were valued at £140,000, today's equivalent of around £17 million, including £80,000 in government funds. He left £1000 for the Academy, but after legal disputes, it ended up receiving £20,000, which it destined for the artist's pension fund and another to assist artists in financial needs; the latter a wish that Turner had expressed in his will.

In 1856, after five years of legal disputes started by his cousins, part of the financial assets of his estate were divided among the family, even though Turner had excluded them completely from his bequest. The works of art became the property of the nation, to be kept at the National Gallery.

Turner intended that a special gallery would be built to house the paintings. At the time, this did not happen because there was disagreement over the final site. In 1987, Tate Britan inaugurated The Clore gallery, finally fulfilling his wish, 136 years after his death.

Career

Architectural watercolours

Many early sketches by Turner were architectural studies or exercises in perspective. As a young man, he worked for several architects, including Thomas Hardwick, James Wyatt and Joseph Bonomi the Elder. Topography was a thriving industry by which a young artist could pay for his studies. By the end of 1789, he begun to study under the topographical draughtsman Thomas Malton, who specialised in London views. Turner learned from him the basic tricks of the trade, copying and colouring outline prints of British castles and abbeys. He would later call Malton "My real master".

The Academy

Turner was recognized as a child prodigy and was accepted as a student in the Royal Academy Schools in 1789, at the age of 14. He was an accomplished student and made very rapid progress. Only a year after starting his studies, the watercolour A View of the Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth was accepted to the Academy's Annual Exhibition. In 1796, the Academy awarded the eighteen-year-old its "Greater Silver Pallet" award for landscape drawing.

At the age of 21, he exhibited his first (known) oil painting, Fishermen at Sea; a dramatic moonlit seascape. The work was praised by contemporary critics and established Turner's reputation an promising painter of maritime scenes.

During his years at the Academy, Turner was keenly focused on obtaining academic recognition and he used a clever strategy. As Moorby explains, "We need only look at the pictures he submitted for the Exhibition of 1799 – a bumper crop of four oils and seven watercolours – within which we see him self-consciously pitching for academic status and astutely checking all the right boxes for virtuosity, versatility and scholarly allusion". In doing this, he was following the teachings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, which at the time, guided the Academy's critera for judging artistic excellence.

Dutch Boats in a Gale, presented the next year at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1801, "took the Academy by storm". It was hung in the best location of the whole exhibition: in the Great Room, centered, and opposite to the entrance. It so impressed the Academy and the art critics that the following year Turner was admitted as a Royal Academician. At only 27 years of age, he became the second youngest artist in the institution's history to achieve the highest academic recognition in England.

Even though the Napoleonic Wars had considerably reduced the demand for large historical paintings, Turner kept receiving substantial commissions for them from wealthy patrons. In 1799, Turner had received 150 guineas for The Fifth Plague of Egypt from William Beckford. In 1801, Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, one of the richest men in England, paid him a commission of 250 guineas (equivalent to over £20,000 today) for the marine painting Dutch Boats in a Gale. For comparison, a year earlier, he had accepted £10 for Fishermen at Sea plus other watercolours.

Commercial success

To the surprise of his elders, while still in his early twenties Turner was able to sell his large paintings at top markets prices. He took advantage of the demand for pendants; paintings that were be hung next to others, either in balance or in contrast. In 1799 Turner had received 150 guineas for The Fifth Plague of Egypt from the extremely rich owner of sugar plantations in Jamaica, William Beckford. He also sold smaller pieces, which generated a steady income. His friend and diarist Joseph Farington records that Turner boasted to him that he had orders from different customers for 60 watercolours.. He was even able to sell large historical in spite of the war between England and France having considerably reduced their demand.

Professor of Perspective

In 1811 Turner made his first public lecture, after being elected as Professor of Perspective three years earlier. As a former architectural draughtsman, Turner knew his topic well. In the three-year period of preparation since his nomination and the start of his lectures, he had done a great amount of research and he presented ideas on many other subjects other than perspective, including the role of poetry in painting and of course, landscape painting techniques.

He argued that the classic notions of single linear perspective were not applicable in all cases, because a painter had to take into account the curvature of things; for instance, to depict a meandering river in a graceful manner. He used two-point perspective in some of his works. An observer noted that "his pictures always looked right, even if the perspective in them was theoretically faulty."

Unfortunately, Turner had very poor lecturing skills and those in attendance had trouble understanding him. He was very disorganized and frequently got confused about where he was and what came next, he strayed from the main topic, he used pompous terms and wrapped them in unintelligible sentences, and his association of ideas was complex and not understood by his audience. His capacity to engage in a deep, lucid discussion in a one-to-one conversation was completely lost in the lecture podium. But for all his shortcomings as a lecturer, Turner was valued as a teacher in the Academy Schools and former students wrote they were grateful for the valuable advice he gave them during their studio classes.

Printmaking

Turner's major venture into printmaking was the Liber Studiorum or "Book of Studies", a set of 70 prints that he worked on from 1806 to 1819. The Liber Studiorum was an ambitious print project that was inspired by the landscape painter Claude's Liber Veritatis, a set of prints made from his drawings. The Liber Studiorum was meant as a manifesto for British landscape art and promoted Turner's extraordinary creative range. The plates were categorized into genres: marine, mountainous, pastoral, historical, architectural, and elevated or epic pastoral.The artistic value of these prints today is widely recognized, but as a commercial endeavor they were a failure due to his haphazard handling of the sales and distribution process. However, they were very successful in elevating the prestige of landscape painting, which at the time was considered below historical and portrait painting in intellectual and artistic value.

Early Patrons

An early patron, the art collector Thomas Monro, allowed young artists to study his collection. Turner copied works of the major topographical draughtsmen of his time, perfecting his drawing skills. Turner noticed that the John Robert Cozens topographic watercolours in Monro's collection were more vibrant, discovering Cozen's technique of gradation; the gradual change in colors to produce a three-dimensional effect. Turner realized that with gradation, the watercolour medium could convey not only accurate representations of buildings, but also moods. To remove color from selected areas, he learned to use pieces of bread to absorb the color while still wet.

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 many summers from 1808 to 1824. The stormy backdrop of Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps is reputed to have been inspired by a storm over The Chevin in Otley, while he was staying at Farnley Hall.

While still in his early twenties, Turner was able to generate increasing income and recognition by imitating the styles of old masters. According to Hamilton, "this playful chameleon tendency was extraordinarily disarming and had the effect of seducing the collector, catching him off guard." In October 1798, he had 60 commissions from different customers and confided to his friend Joseph Farington that "he had more commissions at present than he could execute and got more money than he expended." During his sketching excursions, he was always on the lookout for saleable subjects.

During his life, Turner made paintings in the style of painters that included Raphael, Canaletto, Claude Lorrain, Titian, Nicolas Poussin, Rembrandt, Rubens, Veronese, and Watteau, among others. In doing so, he was following the teachings of Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Academy, who taught that painters should imitate the style of old masters. However, Turner's natural talent allowed him to go beyond pastiches and show he could make their style his own. They were also a sort of homage (and in some cases an indirect critique) of the old masters.

Turner was a frequent guest of the rich and powerful George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont, at Petworth House in West Sussex and stayed as a guest and even had his own studio at Egremont's large country house. He sketched the family, the aristocratic social gatherings, and painted scenes from the grounds of the house and of the Sussex countryside, including a view of the Chichester Canal.

Critics

Turner's more classical paintings from 1810 to 1830 were, in general, received with very positive reviews. His most successful works, like Dido and Aeneas (1814), Dido building Carthage (1815), The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl (1823), Regulus (1828), and Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829), garnered him a reputation as a painter that was comparable or even that surpassed the old masters.

Early on, Turner started innovating in the representation of light, fog and landscape, as well as in his painting techniques, for example by using a looser touch with the brush and white backgrounds to increase the vibrancy of colors. These paintings elicited very negative comments, even from those who recognized his "earlier" genius. As an art critic wrote in 1827: "When we look back at the works of Turner of some twenty or twenty five years standing and see nature in all her truthfulness glowing under his powerful hand, it makes us as sick as she looks in his pictures now to see so needless a falling off.".

Of what is considered today his masterpiece, Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842), The Athenaeum wrote in exasperation: “This gentleman has, on former occasions, chosen to paint with cream, or chocolate, yolk of egg, or currant jelly – here he uses his whole array of kitchen stuff. Where the steam-boat is – where the harbour begins or where it ends... are matters past our finding out”. And in 1840, John Eagles called the displayed paintings "absurd extravagances [that] disgrace the Exhibition".

But not to all. In 1816, the essayist William Hazlitt (1778-1830) described Turner's paintings as "triumph of the knowledge of the artist, and of the power of the pencil over the world of light and shade". He saw Turner as an artist that "delights to go back to the first chaos of the world, or to that state of things when the waters were separated from the dry land, and light from darkness." And with a modern insight and sensibility that anticipated the way abstract works would be seen a century later, he described his landscapes as "pictures of nothing, and very like [their subjects]. They are pictures of the elements of air, earth, and water [...] forms are mere outlines to catch the eye in passing, and are not intended to be stopped at [...], outlines to catch the eye in passing".

And then there was the class difference. His father was a barber and his mother came from a family of butchers. His unkept appearance, his looks that to many recalled a sailor or a farmer, and his cockney accent – which he never made any effort to disguise – contributed to a rejection from influential member in the Royal Academy, in particular from Sir George Beaumont, who described his paintings as "blots" and observed that the sea in Dutch Boats in a Gale looked like"like pease soup". He even reached the level of insult, at one point publicly calling Turner a "little reptile", due to his physical appearance.

Travels

Beginning in 1791, Turner established an annual routine that he followed until his sixties. After the summer exhibitions at the Royal Academy, he travelled, always motivated by his desire to experience new landscapes. He was an avid sketcher, capturing details of whatever he encountered, from panoramic vistas to the smallest of details, like leaves and flowers . During his lifetime, he filled nearly 300 sketchbooks, most of them during this travels. These sketches served him for years as inspiration for his paintings.

The Thames

With the exception of the sea, the Thames is the most repeated subject in his work. Born only a few yards from the river, he always lived on its shores or very close to it. The shores of the river Thames were his first destination for sketching trips and his first subject for an oil painting. During the summer of 1805 he systematically sketched places along much of the river, from Oxford to the Thames Estuary. These intense months of observation so inspired him that for the next five or six years he presented many river-themed paintings in each of his annual gallery shows based on just his sketchbooks' contents.

Tours of England and Scotland

During the years of war in Europe, the variability of Britain’s climate and geography started to be considered a very valuable source of artistic inspiration. He toured England and Scotland extensively, motivated as always by the thrill of new landscapes, but also to deliver on comissions for print catalogues. Print publishers commissioned extensive landscape surveys from Turner, such as Whitaker's History of Whalley (1799) and History of Richmondshire (1816),, Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England (1814-1827); for the Cooke brothers, The Rivers of England (1822–1826); for Charles Heath, Picturesque Views in England and Wales (1824–1838); and for Thomas Lupton, The Ports of England (1825–1828).

Discovering Europe

Due to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the one-year period of the Peace of Amiens (1802-1803) was the only time without wars in Europe from 1793 to 1814 and in that year Turner – as well as many others – took the opportunity to travel to the continent. Turner visited Switzerland, as he was especially attracted to its mountains. His sketches would later allow him to picture "the sublime"; one of the key aesthetic principles of the 18th and 19th centuries. Turner would come back to Switzerland three more times during his lifetime.

In the twenty-year period from 1821 to 1844, Turner visited several European countries, where he studied the works of old masters and took long hikes into the countryside. His desire to experience the world took him to Paris, Normandy and Brittany (1829); a second visit to Paris three years later (1832); Vienna and Venice, traveling down the Danube and returning via the Rhine (1833); Denmark, Prussia, Hamburg and Rotterdam (1835); France and Switzerland and across the Alps to the Val d'Aosta valley (1836); a second trip to Venice, also visiting Trieste and Coburg (1840); and two final trips to Switzerland in his sixties (1841 and 1844).

Italy

In 1819, Turner made his first extended journey through Italy, visiting Turin, Milan, Como, Venice, Rome, Naples and other cities, while producing numerous sketches and watercolours. His Italian travels, often associated with the tradition of the Grand Tour, became central to the development of his mature style. The later trip to Venice (1833) in particular, inspired important works such as Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute (1835), Venice, the Bridge of Sighs (1840), and The Sun of Venice Going to Sea (1843).

Art

Early Influences

In his formative years, Turner was influenced by Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), Philip James de Loutherbourg (1740-1812), Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) and Richard Wilson (1714 -1782). His most lasting pictorial influence was the french painter Claude Lorrain (c. 1600-1682). In 1799, when Turner was already a Royal Academician, the very wealthy art collector John Julius Angerstein invited him to see his paintings.Standing in front of Claude’s The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (1648), Turner burst into tears. When questioned by the disconcerted Angerstain, he passionately explained: “Because I shall never be able to paint anything like that picture.” When he finished Dido building Carthage (1815), he felt he had finally achieved something comparable to Claude's painting.

But it was the teachings of Sir Joshua Reynolds that provided the most important aesthetic principles that Turner followed throughout his career. When he was a young painter, Turner emulated past masters, as Reynolds suggested. For landscape painting, Reynolds recommended that rather than trying to paint the landscape as it was – and therefore as determined by chance – the painter should aim to find a deeper truth in it, by adding fictional and idealized pictorial elements; as Shanes puts it, depicting "the most attractive features of several places as viewed in the most beautiful of weather and lighting conditions, thus transcending the arbitrary."

Reynolds also taught that painting should be akin to poetry, aiming to convey the whole of human experience; the "human landscape" as Shanes aptly calls it. In following Reynold's teachings, many of Turner's paintings were explicitly associated to poems, in some cases even composed by him, like in Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps. In closely tying landscape painting to poetry, he was trying to demonstrate that it could have as much intellectual value as history paintings, considered the most prestigious genre. In Hannibal, he also included historical references and moral teachings, as he did in many other future works. For example, in The Field of Waterloo (1818), rather than depicting a scene of valiant victory – as all other British painters had done to celebrate Napoleon's defeat – Turner presents us with a battlefield littered with corpses; an indictment of the horrors of war. In 1818, an art critic recognized his mastery in combining painting and poetry: "If there is one man in existence whose works possess the quality [of poetry] in a higher degree than another, it is Turner."

The Human Landscape

Turner's landscapes and seascapes are more than just pictorial representations of nature. They usually tell a story by including human figures who are experiencing nature; in his most striking paintings, when nature is at its most violent, such as in The Shipwreck (1805). But whereas in the The Shipwreck the drama alludes to desperation and fear, in Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon coming on (1840), which depictas a real event, Turner makes a scathing comment on the greed and evilness of the slave trade.

"Turner was most decidedly not just a landscape and marine artist" observes Shanes, "equally he was a painter of mankind. As such he afforded us profound insights into the nature of the human condition."

The picturesque

Often overshadowed by his more dramatic paintings, the pastoral and picturesque side of Turner is as notable and contributed greatly to his acclaim (as well as to his financial success), for example his Scene in Derbyshire (1827) and The Golden Bough (1834). The majority of his pastoral were painted in watercolour, frequently en plein air – a practice of painting that had been in use in Britain since the 17th century,

Style

Turner's early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stay true to the traditions of English landscape and were inspired by his travels throughout Britain, particularly to Wales. These were mainly focused on architectural work, which made use of his superior drawing skills. Working largely outside, Turner's sketches are bold and fresh, as he always seeking novel ways to capture what he was seeing. The experimental watercolours and even some oil paintings he made en plein air could not have originated within the confines of a studio.

In 1793, he showed the oil titled The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, which foreshadowed his later dramatic landscapes. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects. In his obituary of Turner, the British writer Peter Cunningham, wrote that it was: "recognised by the wiser few as a noble attempt at lifting landscape art out of the tame insipidities ... [and] evinced for the first time that mastery of effect for which he is now justly celebrated".

His rapid academic recognition and financial success allowed him the freedom to innovate early in his career. His paintings started to show a darker chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. As his style evolved, Turner's used oils ever more transparently and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of this is Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844), where the objects are barely recognisable as his objective was to convey a perception of speed.

Turner's imagination was sparked by natural phenomena, such as sunlight, storms, rain, and fog. The 19th century English art critic John Ruskin described him as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature". During his whole career, Turner was particularly fascinated by the violent power of the sea; from Fishermen at Sea – the first oil he exhibited at the Royal Academy in his early twenties – to The Slave Ship (1840) and Seascape: Folkestone, painted 1850, the year before his death. According to Riding and Johns, marine painting "was being reinvented, and Turner played the leading role in that process."

Even so, widespread appreciation of his later, more abstract works is relatively recent. Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery from 1934 to 1945, reports that in the late 1940s, he found "rolls of these [abstract Turner paintings] stacked in the cellars of the National Gallery where they were thought to be old tarpaulins, and glimpsing a watercolour sheet patching a broken window."

Materials

Turner experimented with a wide variety of pigments. He used formulations like carmine, despite knowing that they were not long-lasting, and against the advice of contemporary experts to use more durable pigments. As a result, many of his colours have now faded. Ruskin complained at how quickly his work decayed; Turner was indifferent to posterity and chose materials that looked good when freshly applied. By 1930, there was concern that both his oils and his watercolours were fading.

Legacy

The Royal Academy of Arts, St Paul's Cathedral, and the Victoria & Albert Museum all hold statues of Turner. The City of Westminster unveiled a memorial plaque at the site of his birthplace at 21 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, on 2 June 1999.

The Turner Prize was created in 1984. It is presented every year to a British visual artist, and includes a cash award of £40,000. In keeping with Turner's resolve to challenge established artistic traditions, it is awarded to artists that aspire to change the norms, so it usually generates considerable controversy and media coverage.

A major exhibition, "Turner's Britain", with material (including The Fighting Temeraire) on loan from around the globe, was held at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery from 7 November 2003 to 8 February 2004.

In 2005, Turner's The Fighting Temeraire was voted Britain's "greatest painting" in a public poll organised by the BBC.

In February 2020, the Bank of England included a portrait of Turner, with a backdrop of The Fighting Temeraire, on the £20 note.

In popular culture

Leo McKern played Turner in The Sun Is God, a 1974 Thames Television production directed by Michael Darlow. The programme aired on 17 December 1974, during the Turner Bicentenary Exhibition in London.

British filmmaker Mike Leigh wrote and directed Mr. Turner, a biopic of Turner's later years, released in 2014. The film stars Timothy Spall as Turner, Dorothy Atkinson, Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson, and premiered in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, with Spall taking the award for Best Actor.