J. M. W. Turner

His later paintings challenged classicisist artistic conventions and were rejected by critics but are considered today his most important works. Their expressionistic renditions of light and atmosphere inspired the early impressionists Monet and Pissarro when they saw them in London in 1870, 20 years after Turner's death. A child prodigy, Turner was accepted as a student at the Royal Academy of Arts when he was only 14 years old and had a rapid ascent to recognition, fame and financial success. He exhibited his first work in the Academy's Annual Exhibition at 15. At 27, Turner was elected as a Royal Academician – the highest status in the institution – becoming the youngest artist to achieve this distinction in the Academy's history. In spite of these accomplishments, he was sneered at during his whole career by some influential critics and less successful academicians due to his humble origins; his father was a barber and his mother came from a family of butchers. Turner's artistic style evolved significantly during his lifetime. He started by imitating old masters; a conscious strategy to gain academic recognition. He was also keenly aware of what wealthy art collectors craved. In his thirties, after becoming a Royal Academician and achieving financial success, he started painting in an increasingly impressionistic and abstract style, using landscape sketches from his extensive travels throughout Europe as inspiration. He experimented with the representation of light, fog and landscape, with some of his most notable paintings using a vortex as a central compositional element. These departures from established artistic traditions were not understood at the time and generated very negative criticism. Some speculated that he was losing his eyesight. Paintings from his final years could be classified as late impressionism or even modern art. Turner was attracted to printmaking and he mastered the different printmaking techniques. He especially liked creating mezzotints, and spent 12 years completing a collection of 71 prints using this technique, which he called the Liber Studiorum (Book of Studies). The collection was highly praised and was a key factor in elevating the status of landscape painting. He was a prolific artist, producing about 550 oil paintings and over 2,000 watercolours during his lifetime. In an unpredecented gesture, He bequeathed to the nation roughly 300 oil paintings, a collection worth a small fortune. Many of the oil paintings are displayed at London's Tate Britain museum.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on April 1775 in Maiden Lane in the Covent Garden London district, where he lived his first 24 years. A younger sister, Mary Ann, died in childhood. Turner's father, William Turner, had a barbershop in the first floor, where he also sold wigs. By the time Turner was 10, his father proudly displayed his young son's drawings in the window, which were sold for a few shillings, and helped Turner get his early start as an aspiring painter. His father boasted to the artist Thomas Stothard that: "My son, sir, is going to be a painter". His father would later retire as a barber to assist Turner in running his studio and paint gallery. His mother, Mary Marshall, came from a family of butchers. Showing signs of mental disorder, Turner's father was forced to place her in St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics and she was later moved to Bethlem Hospital, mental asylum popularly known as "bedlam", where she died in 1804. In 1785, when he was 10 years old, his father sent him to live with his maternal uncle, Joseph Mallord William Marshall, a butcher, in Brentford, then a small town on the banks of the River Thames west of London, where he attended elementary school. The earliest known artistic exercise from this period is a series of simple colourings of engraved plates from Henry Boswell's Picturesque View of the Antiquities of England and Wales. A year later, he was sent to Margate on the north-east Kent coast. There, he produced a series of drawings of the town and surrounding area. In 1789, Turner again stayed with his uncle, who had retired to Sunningwell (then in Berkshire, now part of Oxfordshire). A whole sketchbook of work from this time survives, as well as a watercolour of Oxford. The use of pencil sketches and watercolours on location, as the foundation for later finished paintings, formed the basis of Turner's essential working style during his whole career.

In 1804, he took the highly unusual step of opening a private gallery. Demonstrating his keen commercial instincts, the gallery offered him an alternative sales channel to the Royal Academy's annual exhibition. Over a 60-year career, he returned repeatedly to the River Thames, depicting it in hundreds of works.This fascination motivated him to occupy several country homes on or very near the river. For 7 years he rented houses in Isleworth and then in Hammersmith, modifying a boat into a floating studio. In 1811 he bought Sandycombe Lodge, a rural villa in the riverside town of Twickenham. Since Turner's explorations of rough, mountainous terrain across England and Europe had made him a resilient walker, he regularly made the 10 mile journey on foot between Sandycombe and his Harley Street house. Finally, in his seventies, he rented a cottage in front of the Thames in Chelsea under the pseudonym "Mr. Booth", to protect his privacy.

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".

While still in his early twenties, Turner was able to generate a steady income and increasing recognition by imitating the styles of old masters. In October 1798, Turner confided to his friend Joseph Farington that "he had more commissions at present than he could execute and got more money than he expended." Even though the war between England and France had considerably reduced the demand for large historical paintings, Turner was receiving substantial commissions for them from wealthy patrons. In 1799, Turner had received 150 guineas for The Fifth Plague of Egypt from the extremely rich William Beckford. In 1801, Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater paid him 250 guineas (equivalent to over £20,000 today) for the marine painting Dutch Boats in a Gale. During his life, Turner made paintings in the style of painters including 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. According to Hamilton, "this playful chameleon tendency was extraordinarily disarming and had the effect of seducing the collector, catching him off guard." Important support for his work 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 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. Turner was a frequent guest of George 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 20 paintings, the largest collection of his work outside the Tate.

During his whole life, Turner's humble origins generated resentments and insidious comments from the more Patrician members of the Academy, in particular from Sir George Beaumont, an amateur painter but very influential in the Londong art establishment. He publicly called him a ‘little Reptile’ due to his physical appearance and instigated criticism of his treatment of the sea, giving him the nickname "the white painter" as a pejorative term of what he considered a distateful excess in the use of white paint in his seascapes. His innovations in the representation of light, fog and landscape in some of his most notable paintings, were a departure from long established artistic traditions and were not understood at the time, generating very negative criticism. Some even speculated that he was losing his eyesight. Paintings from his final years could be classified as late impressionism or even modern art. In spite of the criticism and personal attacks of important members of the Royal Academy, Turner always held it in the highest regard. His contemporaries report that he never expressed negative criticism of his fellow academicians. Furthermore, the unprecedented number and value of the oil paintings he bequeathed to the Academy in his will reinforces the esteem which Turner had for the institution.

Turner first travelled to continental Europe during the Peace of Amiens in 1802. He started in France where he studied in the Louvre in Paris, and visited Switzerland in the same year before undertaking many visits to Italy. His Italian travels, often associated with the tradition of the Grand Tour, became central to the development of his mature style. In 1819, Turner made his first extended journey through Italy, travelling through Turin, Milan, Como, Venice, Rome, Naples and other cities while producing numerous sketches and watercolours. Venice in particular became one of his most important subjects, inspiring 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).

The shores of the river Thames were his first destination for sketching trips and his first subject for an oil painting. 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 or very close to it: in Isleworth, Hammersmith, and finally in Twickenham. During 1805 Turner systematically sketched places along much of the river, from Oxford to the Thames Estuary. Working largely outside, Turner sketchs are bold and fresh, seeking novel ways to describe 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. Moorby comments on Turner's artistic skill in depicting the shores of the Thames: "The simpler something is, the harder it can be to do well, but [he was] exceptionally skillful at representing living, moving things with painterly abbreviations, distilling the essence of the physical world into a matrix of gestural brushstrokes."

As Turner grew older, he became more eccentric. He had few close friends 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 effect on him, and thereafter, he was subject to bouts of depression. He never married but had a relationship with an older widow, his housekeeper, Sarah Danby. He is believed to have been the father of her two daughters Evelina Dupuis and Georgiana Thompson. Evelina married Joseph Dupuis on 31 October 1817. It was recorded that her mother, Sarah Danby, was a witness along with Charles Thompson. Turner formed a relationship with Sophia Caroline Booth after her second husband died, and from 1846 he lived with her as "Mr Booth" or "Admiral Booth" in her house at 6 Davis's Place (now Cheyne Walk) in Chelsea, until his death in December 1851. 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 friendship again. Before leaving for the Middle East, Daniell commissioned Turner's portrait from John Linnell. Turner had previously refused to sit for the artist, and it was difficult 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 in London in 1851, aged 76, at the residence of Sophia Booth, the woman believed to be his common law wife. He is buried in St Paul's Cathedral, where he lies near the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. In an unpredecented gesture, he bequeathed to the nation about 300 oil paintings. These were worth a fortune, considering that his oil paintings had been regularly purchased for 250 to 400 guineas each; today's equivalent of £20,000 to £30,000. The bequest also included 30,000 watercolours and drawings and 280 sketchbooks, as well as a large cash donation to the Royal Academy to support young artists with limited financial means. Many of the oil paintings and the main watercolours are displayed at London's Tate Britain and National Gallery museums. The sketchbooks and lesser works are kept in the archives of the National Gallery.

Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised 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". Turner was recognised as an artistic genius; the English art critic John Ruskin described him as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature". Turner's imagination was sparked by shipwrecks, fires (including the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner witnessed first-hand, and transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen at the 1840 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition, where The Slave Ship (1840), and Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water (1840) were first shown. A 2003 exhibition at the Clark Art Institute suggested these two paintings were pendants, due in part to their similar content and size. Turner's work drew criticism from contemporaries. An anonymous reviewer of the 1840 Royal Academy exhibition, later identified as John Eagles, called the displayed paintings "absurd extravagances [that] disgrace the Exhibition". Sir George Beaumont, a landscape painter and fellow member of the Royal Academy, described his paintings as "blots". Turner's major venture into printmaking was the Liber Studiorum (Book of Studies), seventy prints that he worked on from 1806 to 1819. The Liber Studiorum was an expression of his intentions for landscape art. The idea was loosely based on Claude Lorrain's Liber Veritatis (Book of Truth), where Claude had recorded his completed paintings; a series of print copies of these drawings, by then at Devonshire House, had been a huge publishing success. Turner's plates were meant to be widely disseminated, and categorised 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 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. His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stay true to the traditions of English landscape. In Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature has 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. In Turner's later years, he used oils ever more transparently and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognisable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting but exerted an influence on art in France; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques. He is also generally regarded as a precursor of abstract painting. High levels of volcanic ash in the atmosphere (from the eruption of Mount Tambora) 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. John Ruskin said that an early patron, Thomas Monro, Principal Physician of Bedlam, and a collector and amateur artist, 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 his friend Girtin, the healthy and constant development of the greater power is primarily to be attributed; the greatness of the power itself, it is impossible to over-estimate. Together with some young artists in Monro's London house, Turner copied works of the major topographical draughtsmen of his time and honed his drawing skills. However, some of John Robert Cozens's watercolours were present in Monro's house, which were more vibrant than the neat topographic renderings. These works demonstrated to the young Turner that the watercolour medium could prove artistically beneficial, via its value placed on mood instead of information.

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.

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.

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