joseph mallord william turner // biography (1775-1851) / gallery

//J. M. W. TURNER//

Known as: English Romantic landscape artist (the painter of light)

Born: 1775, Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, UK

Birthname: Joseph Mallord William Turner

Died: 19 December 1851, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, UK

Buried: St Paul's Cathedral

Joseph Mallord William Turner was the son of a barber. His talent was noticeable at an early age and at 14 he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools; at 16 he first exhibited at the RA. In 1799 he became an ARA, three years later a RA; Professor of Perspective at 32, and, towards the end of his life, Deputy President (1845). He also audited the finances for many years.

From 1792 he made the first of the sketching tours he is now famous for. In the mid-1790s he worked with Thomas Girtin (1775-1802) at the house of Dr Thomas Munro (1759-1833), a London physician and amateur draughtsman who patronized many artists. Up until the mid-1790s, Turner worked exclusively with watercolour; in 1796 or 97 he exhibited his first oil paintings at the RA. The influence on his early works was Dutch 17th-century marine painting, the work of Richard Wilson (c.1713-2), Gellee Claude (1600-82) and Gaspard Poussin (1615-75).

His work polarized society. Some saw it as unfinished and attacked it forcibly while others strongly defended it. The outcome was that hs work fell out of fashion and there was a decline in sales of his larger oil-paintings. To counter this, Turner published a series of engravings of different types of landscapes entitled Liber Studiorum. Again, this wasn't successful.

He made his frst visit to Italy in 1819, returning in 1828, 1835, and in 1840. It was from his first visit that he started to use the pale brilliance of colour in his oil-paintings that he had already used in his watercolours.

By now, he was seriously out of favour. Public interest was pointed in the direction of the Pre-Raphaelites. That changed when the most influential art critic of 19th-century England, John Ruskin (1819-1900), defended his work.

Trivia:

Turner was always tight with his money and part of the reason for his unsuccessful engraving series, Liber Studiorum, was that he underpaid the engravers
He left nearly 300 paintings and nearly 20,000 watercolours and drawings to the nation
He had a mistress, Sarah Danby, by whom he had two daughters. He never married
His mother, Mary Marshall, died in 1804 after being committed to a mntal asylum
His father ended up as Turner' assistant. He died in 1829
Suffered from bouts of depression

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