J. M. W. Turner
Painter of light and storm.
Turner began as a watercolourist and moved towards almost abstract pictures of light, steam and weather. He anticipated Impressionism.
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in 1775 in Covent Garden, London. His father was a barber and wigmaker who displayed his son's drawings in his window. His mother was mentally ill and was eventually committed to an asylum. Turner entered the Royal Academy Schools at just fourteen and exhibited his first watercolour there the following year. In 1802 he became a full Academician, at only 26.
In his early years he travelled around Britain painting topographical watercolours of castles, churches and landscapes. He soon moved on to large oil paintings with dramatic subjects, such as Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812) in Tate. He admired Claude Lorrain and bequeathed two of his paintings, among them Dido Building Carthage (1815), to the National Gallery on condition that they hang beside Claude's works. From 1819 he often travelled to Italy, and Venice became one of his favourite subjects.
Over the years the forms in Turner's pictures dissolved into light, mist, steam and water. The Fighting Temeraire (1839) shows an old warship being towed by a steam tug to be broken up. It is in the National Gallery and has been voted Britain's favourite painting. The Slave Ship (1840) in Boston depicts slaves being thrown overboard. Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) in the National Gallery shows a train rushing through the rain. According to a well-known but uncertain story, he had himself lashed to a mast to experience the storm he depicted in Snow Storm (1842).
Turner was short, taciturn and careful with his business affairs. He never married but had two daughters with the widow Sarah Danby. In his old age he lived in Chelsea with Sophia Booth and was known to the neighbours as “Mr Booth”. Many critics mocked his late works, but the young John Ruskin defended him in his book Modern Painters. Turner died in 1851.
He bequeathed some three hundred oil paintings and thousands of watercolours and drawings to the nation. Most are in Tate Britain. Turner is seen as a forerunner of Impressionism and of abstract painting. The annual Turner Prize for contemporary art is named after him, and since 2020 he has appeared on the British twenty-pound note.