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J.M.W Turner (the J.M.W stands for Joseph Mallord William by the way), was born in London in 1775. His dad was a barber, but Turner always knew he wanted to be an artist. When he was just 14 years old he became a student at the Royal Academy of Art in London. Joseph Mallord William Turner. London Bridge from Downstream near the End of ...
J. M. W. Turner. Joseph Mallord William Turner RA (23 April 1775 – 19 December 1851), known in his time as William Turner, [a] was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colouring, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings.
- Overview
- Early life and works
- Middle years
J.M.W. 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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 remains one of Britain’s most admired artists through his achievements in both oils and watercolours. At the beginning of the 19th century, he came to prominence at the same time as John Constable, John Crome, John Sell Cotman, Peter De Wint and David Cox, in an era when landscape as a genre was achieving a new status and significance.
Turner profited from extensive training both within and outside of the Royal Academy (RA) Schools. He was admitted to the RA’s Plaster Academy at the age of fourteen, and to the Life Class three years later. He gained additional experience coloring prints, working as an architectural draftsman, and designing theatrical sets.
J.M.W. Turner may have regarded himself first and foremost as a landscape painter, but his art tells us a lot about the volatile and rapidly modernising times that he lived through. His lifelong interest in the inventions, conflicts, politics, society, culture and science of his time influenced many of his most original works and transformed his way of painting.
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Apr 27, 2018 · Apr 27, 2018 12:15PM. J. M. W. Turner. The Fighting Temeraire, 1839. The National Gallery, London. By the time of his death in 1851, Joseph Mallord William Turner had been living under an alias in a Chelsea hovel in London for at least five years. Few knew his whereabouts, not even the housekeeper of his official residence at 47 Queen Anne Street.
