J. M. W. Turner

EARLY YEARS 

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on April 23, 1775 in Maiden Lane, an alley, north of the Strand in London.

The house in Maiden Lane where Turner was born, c.1850s

Joseph's father William Turner was a wig-maker who later became a Covent Garden barber.

His mother, Mary Marshall, a housewife, came from a family of butchers.

His younger sister, Mary Ann, was born in September 1778 but died in August 1783.

Joseph's mother became increasingly mentally unstable during her son's early years, perhaps in part due to the early death of Mary Ann. She was committed to a mental asylum and died at Bedlam in 1804.

Due to the load placed on the family by these problems, the young Joseph was sent in 1785 to stay with his uncle on his mother's side in Brentford, west of London. It was here that he first expressed an interest in painting.  

Soon Joseph was creating many paintings, which his father exhibited in his barber shop window.

Joseph received very little schooling and  his father taught him to read. 

CAREER 

It was while living with his uncle that Turner first  started creating paintings, which his father exhibited in his barber shop window.

Turner went to the Royal Academy of Art when he was only fifteen years old. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the academy at that time, chaired the panel that admitted him. 

Turner was successful from an early age as he was in tune with the romantic taste of the time.

Once elected to the Royal Academy in 1802 Turner began travelling widely in Europe, starting with France and Switzerland in 1802 and studying in the Louvre in Paris in the same year. He also made many visits to Venice during his lifetime.

By 1807, Turner had just been made Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy with a flourishing studio and gallery in Queen Anne Street, off Harley Street, London. However,  the English landscape artist's pet cats had the run of the building, even walking across the back of drawings he had prepared for teaching at the Royal Academy. 

He was business minded. By his mid-30s, Turner had made about a million pounds in today’s money, though he lived simply.

Turner charged £300 for a painting (about £20,000-today) – it was the sort of sum his barber father earned in a year.

Charles Turner, c. 1840, Portrait of J. M. W. Turner

Turner painted more than 100 oils and watercolors of the South East English town of Margate and its surrounding coastline. 

In his later years Turner's luminous use of colors was too far ahead of his time to be appreciated.

Turner painted light in a new and vivid way and today is considered to be Britain's greatest landscape painter. 

PAINTINGS 

Not good with words, Turner found it difficult to express what his paintings were about.

His first watercolor, A View of the Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth was accepted for the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1790 when Turner was just 15.

His most famous paintings include The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up. Often called just The Fighting Temeraire, it is an oil on canvas painted by Turner in 1838 and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839. 

The painting depicts the 98-gun ship HMS Temeraire, which played a distinguished role in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, being towed by a paddle-wheel steam tug towards its final berth in 1838 to be broken up for scrap. Turner's painting achieved widespread critical acclaim, and accolades from the likes of John Ruskin and William Makepeace Thackeray. 

The Fighting Temeraire was Turner's particular favorite; he only lent it once and refused to ever do so again. The English landscape artist also refused to sell it at any price, and on his death bequeathed it to the nation. It hangs today in the National Gallery,

In 2005, The Fighting Temeraire was voted the UK's favorite painting in a poll organised by BBC Radio 4's Today program.

The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1839, oil on canvas

Turner believed that slavery should be outlawed worldwide. He was inspired to paint The Slave Ship in 1840 after reading The History and Abolition of the Slave Trade by Thomas Clarkson.

Turner exhibited The Slave Ship during the anti-slavery conference, intending for Prince Albert, who was speaking at the event, to see it and be moved to increase British anti-slavery efforts. 

Mark Twain described The Slave Ship as "A tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes."

Snowstorm is a painting by Turner, which shows a steamship in a snowstorm trying to get into a harbor. In order to get the right feeling into this painting, Turner had himself tied to a ship's mast during a storm, so that he could see what it was like. It was panned by early critics when Turner unveiled the work in 1842 with one calling it "soapsuds and whitewash".

Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, c. 1842, oil on canvas

APPEARANCE AND CHARACTER 

Turner was undersized and corpulent with an ungainly appearance and a pig-like face. He was partial to black clothes.

J. M. W. Turner. Self Portrait, Tate Galley, London

The English landscape artist was untidy in his old age with his fingers never freed from paint. 

Turner was secretive and crotchety. He was tough, ambitious, and possessed of lifelong tremendous energy. The artist had a cold demeanor but a generous nature.

He was inarticulate, speaking with a London street accent, dropping his "h"s, and coarse. 

RELATIONSHIPS 

Turner never married, preferring the arts to families, but had two mistresses. 

He had two daughters by his first mistress, a widow named Sarah Danby.

In 1833, at the age of 58, Turner began a relationship with another widow named Sophia Caroline Booth. She was a kindly and buxom woman who ran the Rendezvous seafront boarding house in Margate.

Turner had few close friends, except for his father, who lived with him for thirty years, eventually working as his studio assistant.

When his father died in 1829, it had a profound effect on Turner, and thereafter he was subject to bouts of depression. 

PERSONAL LIFE 

Turner was discriminating when it came to salads. Presented with one at his table, he commented to his neighbor "nice cool green, that lettuce, isn't it? And the beetroot pretty red- not quite strong enough; and the mixture delicate tint of yellow, Add some mustard and then you have one of my pictures." 

Turner was a habitual user of snuff. In 1838, Louis Philippe I, King of the French, whom he had known when Phillipe was in exile at Twickenham, presented him with a gold snuff-box. 

LAST YEARS AND DEATH 

Turner grew increasingly eccentric and depressed in his old age. In 1850 he disappeared from his home. His housekeeper after a search of many months found him hiding in a house under an assumed name in Chelsea. He had been ill for a long time.

A 1847 daguerreotype of Turner 

Turner died of cholera in his house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea on December 19 1851 with the words "The sun is God" on his lips. 

At his request Turner was buried in St Paul's Cathedral, where he lies next to Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Turner left his entire £140,000 estate to found a charity for 'decayed artists.' But following his death, a group of distant relations fought the will, and split the cash among themselves.

In his will Turner left nearly 300 paintings and close to 20,000 water colors to the nation together with a large sum of money so that they could be on permanent exhibition. As a result of legal problems this didn't happen.

Twenty-two years after his death, the British Parliament passed an act allowing Turner's paintings to be lent to museums outside London, and so began the process of scattering the pictures which Turner had wanted to be kept together.

The Tate Gallery created the prestigious annual Turner Prize art award in 1984, named in Turner's honor.