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Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775 – 19 December 1851) was an English
Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style can be said
to have laid the foundation for Impressionism.
 Life and
career
Turner was born in Maiden Lane Covent Garden, London, England. His father, William
Gay Turner (27 January 1738 – 7 August 1829), was a barber and wig maker. His
mother, Mary Marshall, became increasingly mentally unstable, perhaps, in part, due
to the early death of Turner's younger sister, Helen Turner in 1786. She died in
1804, after having been committed in 1799 to a mental asylum.
Possibly due to the load placed on the family by these problems, the young Turner
was sent in 1785 to stay with his uncle on his mother's side in Brentford, which
was then a small town west of London on the banks of the River Thames. It was here
that he first expressed an interest in painting. A year later he went to school in
Margate in Kent to the east of London in the area of the Thames estuary. By this
time he had created many drawings, which his father exhibited in his shop
window.
He entered the Royal Academy of Art schools in 1789, when he was only 14 years old,
and was accepted into the academy a year later. Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of
the Royal Academy at the time, chaired the panel that admitted him. At first Turner
showed a keen interest in architecture but was advised to keep to painting by the
architect Thomas Hardwick (junior). A watercolour of Turner's was accepted for the
Summer Exhibition of 1790 after only one year's study. He exhibited his first oil
painting in 1796, Fishermen at Sea, and thereafter exhibited at the academy nearly
every year for the rest of his life.
Although renowned for his oils, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of
British watercolour landscape painting. He is commonly known as "the painter of
light".
One of his most famous oil paintings is The fighting Temeraire tugged to her last
berth to be broken up, painted in 1838, which hangs in the National Gallery,
London. See also The Golden Bough.
Turner travelled 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. On a visit to Lyme Regis, in Dorset, England, he
painted a stormy scene (now in the Cincinnati Art Museum).
Important support for his works also came from Walter Ramsden Fawkes, of Farnley
Hall, near Otley in Yorkshire, who became a close friend of the artist. Turner
first visited Otley in 1797, aged 22, when commissioned to paint watercolours of
the area. He was so attracted to Otley and the surrounding area that he returned
time and time again. The stormy backdrop of Hannibal Crossing The Alps is reputed
to have been inspired by a storm over Otley's Chevin while Turner was staying at
Farnley Hall.
Turner was also a frequent guest of Lord Lamont at Petworth House in West Sussex
and painted scenes from the grounds of the house and of the Sussex countryside,
including a view of the Chichester Canal that Egremont funded. Petworth House still
displays a number of paintings.
As he grew older, Turner became more eccentric. He had few close friends except for
his father, who lived with him for thirty years, eventually working as his studio
assistant. His father's death in 1829 had a profound effect on him, and thereafter
he was subject to bouts of depression. He never married, although he had two
daughters by Sarah Danby, one born in 1801, the other in 1811.
He died in the house of his mistress Mrs Sophia Caroline Booth in Cheyne Walk,
Chelsea on 19 December 1851. At his request he was buried in St Paul's Cathedral,
where he lies next to Sir Joshua Reynolds. His last exhibition at the Royal Academy
was in 1850.
The architect Philip Hardwick (1792–1870) who was a friend of Turner's and also the
son of the artist's tutor, Thomas Hardwick, was one in charge of his funeral
arrangements and wrote to those who knew Turner to tell them at the time of his
death that "I must inform you, we have lost him".
Style
Turner's talent was recognized early in his life. He became a full art academician
at the age of 29. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his
mature work is characterized by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric
washes of paint. According to David Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his
later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still
recognized as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin
described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure
the moods of Nature." (Piper 321)
Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of
shipwrecks, fires (such as the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner
rushed to witness first-hand, and which he transcribed in a series of watercolor
sketches), natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm,
rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn
after the Wreck (1840) and The Slave Ship (1840).
Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for
humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and
merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity
amidst the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means
awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the
power of God - a theme that artists and poets were exploring in the late 18c. and
early 19c. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit
and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving
out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the
radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be
'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was
striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding
primarily to optical phenomena. ("The Sun is God," he stated shortly before his
death.)
His first works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795) and Venice: S. Giorgio Maggiore
(1819), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape. However, in Hannibal
Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had
already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used
watercolor technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral
atmospheric effects. (Piper 321)
One popular story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality,
states that he even had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience
the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea.
In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation
of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature
style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the
objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent
light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later
exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly
Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques. In the modern art era, advocates of
abstract art were also inspired by Turner.
It has been suggested that the high levels of ash in the atmosphere during the 1816
"Year Without a Summer," which led to unusually spectacular sunsets during this
period, were an inspiration for some of Turner's work.
John Ruskin says in his "Notes" on Turner in March 1878, that an early patron, Dr
Thomas Monro, the Principal Physician of Bedlam, was a significant influence on
Turner's style:
His true master was Dr Monro; to the practical teaching of that first patron and
the wise simplicity of method of watercolour study, in which he was disciplined by
him and companioned by Giston, the healthy and constant development of the greater
power is primarily to be attributed; the greatness of the power itself, it is
impossible to over-estimate.
The first American to buy a Turner painting was James Lenox of New York City, a
private collector. Lenox wished to own a Turner and in 1845 bought one sight unseen
through an intermediary, his friend C. R. Leslie. From among the paintings Turner
had on hand and was willing to sell for GBP £500, Leslie selected and shipped the
1832 atmospheric seascape Staffa, Fingal's Cave. Worried about the painting's
reception by Lenox, who knew Turner's work only through his etchings, Leslie wrote
Lenox that the quality of Staffa, "a most poetic picture of a steam boat" would
become apparent in time. Upon receiving the painting Lenox was baffled, and
"greatly disappointed" by what he called the painting's "indistinctness". When
Leslie was forced to relay this opinion to Turner, Turner said "You should tell Mr.
Lenox that indistinctness is my fault." Staffa, Fingal's Cave is currently owned by
the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
Legacy
Turner left a small fortune which he hoped would be used to support what he called
"decayed artists". Part of the money went to the Royal Academy of Arts, which now
does not use it for this purpose though occasionally it awards students the Turner
Medal. His collection of finished paintings was bequeathed to the British nation,
and he intended that a special gallery would be built to house them. This did not
come to pass owing to a failure to agree on a site, and then to the parsimony of
British governments. Twenty-two years after his death, the British Parliament
passed an Act allowing his 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. In 1910 the main part of the Turner Bequest, which includes unfinished
paintings and drawings, was rehoused in the Duveen Turner Wing at the Tate Gallery.
In 1987 a new wing of the Tate, the Clore Gallery, was opened specifically to house
the Turner bequest, though some of the most important paintings in it remain in the
National Gallery in contravention of Turner's condition that the finished pictures
be kept and shown together.
In 1974, the Turner Museum was founded in the USA by Douglass Montrose-Graem to
house his collection of Turner prints.
A prestigious annual art award, the Turner Prize, created in 1984, was named in
Turner's honour, but has become increasingly controversial, having promoted art
which has no apparent connection with Turner's. Twenty years later the more modest
Winsor & Newton Turner Watercolour Award was founded.
A major exhibition, "Turner's Britain", with material, (including The Fighting
Temeraire) on loan from around the globe, was held at Birmingham Museum & Art
Gallery from 7 November 2003 to 8 February 2004.
In 2005, Turner's The Fighting Temeraire was voted Britain's "greatest painting" in
a public poll organized by the BBC.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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William
Turner - Generator - Biography
