Biography: Joseph Mallord William Turner (J.M.W. Turner)
English painter born in London on 23 April 1775. His father was a barber and wig maker in Covent Garden. At the age of 14, Turner became a student at the Royal Academy schools, where he remained until 1793. He worked for the engraver J.R. Smith and came to the attention of the wealthy art enthusiast, Dr. Thomas Munro. In 1790, he exhibited his first watercolour at the Royal Academy, and in 1796 he exhibited an oil painting, ‘Fishermen at Sea’, the first of a large number of marine subjects which occupied him both in the early and late stages of his career, though rather less in between. From 1792, Turner began to make sketching tours, first of Britain and, from 1802 onwards, periodically travelling to France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and Italy (particularly to Venice). His exhibited work excited debate: reviled by the Classicists, it was championed by the picturesque school and popular Romantic artists like de Loutherbourg, as well as some figures of the establishment, including Sir Thomas Lawrence. In 1802, Turner was elected a Royal Academician, the youngest ever recorded. Five years later he was made the Academy’s Professor of Perspective. From 1807 to 1819, he published his Liber Studiorum – recording his most important compositions – in honour and answer to the Liber Veritatis of the French Classical landscape painter Claude Lorraine (1600–82). 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).
Joseph Mallord William Turner full version.
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