J.M.W.

Turner
J.M.W. Turner, in full Joseph Mallord William Turner,
(born April 23, 1775, London, England—died December 19, 1851,
London), English Romantic landscape painter whose
expressionistic studies of light, colour, and atmosphere were
unmatched in their range and sublimity.

Early life and works

Turner was the son of a barber. At age 10 he was sent to live with
an uncle at Brentford, Middlesex, where he attended school.
Several drawings dated as early as 1787 are sufficiently
professional to corroborate the tradition that his father sold the
boy’s work to his customers. Turner entered the Royal Academy
schools in 1789 and soon began exhibiting his watercolours there.
From 1792 he spent his summers touring the country in search of
subjects, filling his sketchbooks with drawings to be worked up
later into finished watercolours. His early work is topographical
(concerned with the accurate depiction of places) in character and
traditional in technique, imitating the best English masters of the
day. In 1794 Turner began working for engravers, supplying
designs for the Copper Plate Magazine and the Pocket Magazine.
He was also employed to make copies or elaborations of
unfinished drawings by the recently deceased landscape
painter John Robert Cozens. The influence of Cozens and of the
Welsh landscape painter Richard Wilson helped broaden Turner’s
outlook and revealed to him a more poetic and imaginative
approach to landscape, which he would pursue to the end of his
career with ever-increasing brilliance.
J.M.W. Turner: Self-portrait
Self-portrait, oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner, c. 1799; in the Tate Gallery, London.

Courtesy of the trustees of the Tate Britain, London

From 1796 Turner exhibited oil paintings as well as watercolours

at the Royal Academy. The first, Fishermen at Sea (1796), is a
moonlight scene and was acclaimed by a contemporary critic as
the work “of an original mind.” In 1799, at the youngest permitted
age (24), Turner was elected an associate of the Royal Academy,
and in 1802 he became a full academician, a dignity he marked by
a series of large pictures in which he emulated the achievements of
the Old Masters, especially the 17th-century painters Nicolas
Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Aelbert Cuyp, and Willem van de Velde
the Younger. In 1807 he was appointed professor of perspective.

Turner’s private life, such as it was, was secretive, unsociable, and

somewhat eccentric. In 1798 he entered into an affair, which was
to last about 10 years, with Sarah Danby, a widow who probably
bore him two children. In 1800 Turner’s mother became
hopelessly ill and was committed to a mental hospital. His father
went to live with him and devoted the rest of his life to serving as
his son’s studio assistant and general agent. Also about 1800
Turner took a studio at 64 Harley Street, London, and in 1804 he
opened a private gallery, where he continued to show his latest
work for many seasons. He was by this time overwhelmed with
commissions, and the success of his career was assured.
Turner continued to travel in search of inspiration. He
visited Wales in 1792, 1795, and 1798, Yorkshire and the Lake
District in 1797, the Midlands in 1794, Scotland in 1801, and the
European continent for the first time in 1802. The crossing to
Calais was rough, and in his picture Calais Pier (1802–03) he left
a vivid record of his experience upon arrival. He made more than
400 drawings during this tour of France and Switzerland and
continued for many years to paint pictures of scenes that had
impressed him on the trip. He also studied the Old Masters at
the Louvre.
Turner’s many marine subjects, in which he dramatically builds
upon the foundation of the Dutch 17th-century tradition, reveal his
methodical attempt to master every landscape style he admired
and the ease with which he accomplished this. The rivalry he felt
with painters who had influenced his style is suggested by
his bequest to the National Gallery of his Dido Building Carthage,
or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire (1815) and Sun Rising
Through Vapour: Fishermen Cleaning and Selling Fish (1807) on
condition that they be hung beside his two favourite Claudes.
However, the treatment of landscape in the Thames oil sketches of
about 1805 and in The Shipwreck (1805) suggests that at this time
Turner was developing his original approach to landscape—
emphasizing luminosity, atmosphere, and Romantic, dramatic
subjects.

In 1807 Turner began his great enterprise of publishing a series of

100 plates known as the Liber Studiorum, inspired, in part, by
Claude’s own studio record, Liber veritatis (begun in 1635 and
continued until his death in 1682). Turner’s aim was to document
the great variety and range of landscape; some of the subjects were
taken from his own existing paintings and watercolours. He
employed several engravers, although he supervised the work at
every stage, etched some of the plates himself, and made
innumerable preparatory drawings. The publication was issued in
parts consisting of five plates each and covering all the styles of
landscape composition, including historical, architectural,
mountainous, pastoral, and marine. The first part appeared in
June 1807 and the last in 1819, when Turner evidently lost interest
in the project and abandoned it after the publication of 71 plates.

Middle years

During the second decade of the 1800s, Turner’s painting became

increasingly luminous and atmospheric in quality. Even in
paintings of actual places, such as St. Mawes at the Pilchard
Season (1812), the hard facts of topography are diffused behind
pearly films of colour; other pictures, such as Frosty
Morning (1813), are based entirely on effects of light. In works
such as Snowstorm: Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), Turner
used the power of natural forces to lend drama to historical events.
Turner was much in demand as a painter of castles and
countryseats for their owners, while he also continued to excel in
marine painting. Turner’s masterpiece of this period is the Dort,
or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet Boat from Rotterdam
Becalmed (1818), a tribute to Cuyp.

Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed

Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed, oil on canvas by J.M.W.
Turner, 1818; in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.

Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (B1977.14.77)

With Dido and Aeneas, Leaving Carthage on the Morning of the

Chase (1814), Turner began a series of Carthaginian subjects. The
last exhibitions of his life, at the academy in 1850, included four
works on the same theme. By appending long poetic quotations
from James Thomson’s “Seasons” (1726), from works by Lord
Byron, John Milton, William Shakespeare, and Alexander Pope, or
attributed to his own poetic composition Fallacies of Hope (never
completed), Turner showed that he regarded the literary-historical
interpretation of his works as being of paramount importance.
The coming of peace in 1815 allowed Turner to travel abroad. After
a trip to the field of Waterloo and the Rhine in 1817, Turner set out
in the summer of 1819 on his first visit to Italy. He spent three
months in Rome—also visiting Naples, Florence, and Venice—and
returned home in midwinter. During his journey he made about
1,500 drawings, and in the next few years he painted a series of
pictures inspired by what he had seen. They show a great advance
in his style, particularly in the matter of colour, which became
purer and more prismatic, with a general heightening of key. A
comparison of The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl (1823)
with any of the earlier pictures reveals a far more iridescent
treatment resembling the transparency of a watercolour. The
shadows are as colourful as the lights, and he achieves contrasts by
setting off cold and warm colours instead of dark and light tones.

J.M.W. Turner: Plymouth Citadel

Plymouth Citadel, pencil and watercolour on paper by J.M.W. Turner, c. 1813; in a private
collection.

In a private collection

During the 1820s Turner alternated tours of the continent with

visits to various parts of England and Scotland. In 1827 he painted
brilliant sketches of the regatta at Cowes, and in 1828 he went to
Italy again. From 1828, and particularly after his father’s death in
1829, Turner often visited the earl of Egremont at Petworth,
Sussex, producing splendid sketches of the earl’s house and its
gardens.

J.M.W. Turner: Paris: Hôtel de Ville

Paris: Hôtel de Ville, watercolour strengthened with pen and red ink on white paper by J.M.W.
Turner, 1833; in the Indianapolis Museum of Art. 22.70 × 20.63 cm.

Photograph by Jenny O'Donnell. Indianapolis Museum of Art, gift in Memory of Dr. and
Mrs. Hugo O. Pantzer by their Children, 72.197

Later life and works of J.M.W.

Turner
In the later years of his life, Turner was more famous, rich, and
secretive than ever. After several years of inactivity as professor of
perspective at the Royal Academy, he resigned in 1838. By 1846 he
owned a house by the river at Chelsea, where he lived with a
widow, Sophia Caroline Booth, assuming her surname. Turner
continued to travel. In the last 15 years of his life, he visited Italy,
Switzerland, Germany, and France. Observers have recorded the
untiring energy with which he sketched while abroad, and the
drawings, numbering about 19,000 in the Turner Bequest, bear
witness to this labour.

J.M.W. Turner:  Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute

Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute, oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner, c. 1835; in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Cornelius Vanderbilt,
1899, (99.31), www.metmuseum.org
While Turner’s earlier paintings and drawings show the most
accurate observation of architectural and natural detail, in his later
work this precision is sacrificed to general effects of colour and
light with the barest indication of mass. His composition tends to
become more fluid, suggesting movement and space; some of his
paintings are mere colour notations, barely tinted on a white
ground, such as Norham Castle, Sunrise and Sunrise, with a Boat
Between Headlands (both from c. 1840–50). This approach may
account for the large number of slightly brushed-in canvases
found in Turner’s studio at the time of his death. These colourful
abstractions were often more appreciated at the turn of the 21st
century than the historical and mythological subjects he exhibited.

Apart from fanciful reconstructions of ancient Rome and the

scintillating Venetian cityscapes, which found ready purchasers in
his day, the outstanding examples of his late work are The
Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up,
1838 (1839), a tribute to the passing age of sailing ships as they
were about to be replaced by steam-powered vessels, and Rain,
Steam, and Speed—the Great Western Railway (1844), which
expresses Turner’s intense interest in the changes brought by
the Industrial Revolution. The first of his pictures to be hung in
Britain’s National Gallery was the opalescent The Dogana, San
Giorgio Citella, from the Steps of the Europa (1842), presented in
1847, while Turner was still alive. Turner’s preoccupation with the
dramatic elements of fire and water appears in the two versions
of Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (1835), in the
large sketch A Fire at Sea (c. 1835), and in Rockets and Blue
Lights (1840).

J.M.W. Turner:  Rain, Steam, and Speed—the Great Western Railway

Rain, Steam, and Speed—the Great Western Railway, oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner, 1844;
in the National Gallery, London.
Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York
Turner died in Chelsea in 1851 and was buried in St. Paul’s
Cathedral. By his will he intended to leave most of his fortune of
£140,000 to found a charity for “decayed artists,” and
he bequeathed his finished paintings to the National Gallery, on
condition that a separate gallery be built to exhibit them. As a
result of protracted litigation with his rather distant relatives,
most of the money reverted to them, while both finished and
unfinished paintings and drawings became national property as
the Turner Bequest. It was not until 1908 that a special gallery was
built by Sir Joseph Duveen to house some of the oil paintings at
the Tate Gallery. All the drawings and watercolours were
transferred to the British Museum for safety after the River
Thames flood of 1928, when the storerooms at the Tate Gallery
were inundated, but they were returned to the Tate Gallery on the
opening of the Clore Gallery, an addition designed by James
Stirling expressly for that purpose, in 1987. A few of the oil
paintings remain at the National Gallery.

Legacy

Turner was perhaps the greatest landscapist of the 19th century.

Although brought up in the academic traditions of the 18th
century, he became a pioneer in the study of light, colour, and
atmosphere. He anticipated the French Impressionists in breaking
down conventional formulas of representation; but, unlike them,
he believed that his works should always express significant
historical, mythological, literary, or other narrative themes. A line
of development can be traced from his early historical landscapes
that form settings for important human subjects to his later
concentration on the dramatic aspects of sea and sky. Even
without figures, these late works are expressions of important
subjects: the relationship of man to his environment, the power of
nature as manifested in the terror of the storm or the beneficence
of the sun. Unmatched in his time in the range of his development,
Turner was also unrivaled in the breadth of his subject matter and
the searching innovation of his stylistic treatment.
J.M.W. Turner: The Lauerzersee with Schwyz and the Mythen, Switzerland
The Lauerzersee with Schwyz and the Mythen, Switzerland, pencil, pen, ink, and watercolour
on paper by J.M.W. Turner, c. 1848; in a private collection.

In a private collection

Early in the 19th century, Turner was strongly criticized

by conservative critics for his dynamic compositions and high-
keyed colour. By the end of his life, although his Venetian subjects
and more finished watercolours still appealed to some purchasers,
his concern with atmospheric effects had developed along lines
that departed from the trend in contemporary taste
for realism and high finish, typified by the popularity of complex
narrative painting. Turner’s growing reputation in the second half
of the 19th century was in fact largely due to the championship of
the influential English art critic John Ruskin, who published the
first part of Modern Painters in 1843 to prove Turner’s superiority
to all previous landscape painters and to extol his accurate
rendering of natural appearance. In the 20th century a new
appreciation of the abstract qualities of Turner’s late colour
compositions strengthened his status as one of the most
innovative and technically gifted painters of his century.