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(b London, 23 April 1775; d Chelsea [now in London], 19 Dec 1851). British painter and printmaker. He dominated British landscape painting throughout the first half of the 19th century. He established a reputation in the Royal Academy, London, first as a topographical watercolourist and then within a few years as a painter of Sublime and historical landscapes.
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| Biography: Joseph Mallord William Turner |
The English painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was one of the greatest romantic interpreters of nature in the history of Western art and is still unrivaled in the virtuosity of his painting of light.
The son of a barber, J. M. W. Turner was born on April 23, 1775, in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London. After an illness he was sent to school at Brentford, where his uncle was a butcher. From this period dates Turner's lifelong attachment to the Thames and its scenery. His father is said to have sold Turner's boyhood drawings and copies of engravings at 1 to 3 shillings at his shop, and this may have influenced his decision to have the boy educated as a painter. There is uncertainly about his early drawing masters other than the topographical watercolor painter Thomas Malton. In 1789 Turner was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools, where he attended life classes and worked fairly regularly from the antique from 1790 to 1793.
In 1791 Turner went to Bristol to sketch medieval buildings as far afield as Bath and Malmesbury Abbey, and especially the romantic Avon gorges. The English watercolor school was then rapidly reaching its golden age, and from 1794 to 1797 he worked in the great collection of Dr. Monro, who opened his home to young artists and paid Turner and Thomas Girtin to make copies in the evening, partly with the object of encouraging them. Girtin drew the outlines and Turner washed in the effects.
During this period Turner developed an astonishing command of technique, emulating the effects obtained by Claude Lorrain, Thomas Gainsborough, and the leaders of the modern English watercolor school. Turner quickly became the most brilliant topographical artist of his day, combining minutely observed realism with an incomparable richness of tints and glow of light.
Artistic Development
In 1796 Turner scored a signal success at the Royal Academy with Fisherman at Sea (now identified with an oil painting). Thereafter his development broadly followed two lines. The first was that of the watercolorist who revolutionized the technique of oil painting in the course of dissolving form in light, atmosphere, and color. He was the first English painter to be attacked and ridiculed for being modern in the sense of tending to the abstract.
The second line was that of the devotee of the picturesque who became a romantic via the theatrical sublime. Turner's early and profitable sketching tours in search of picturesque scenery became the habit of a lifetime. The castles and mountains of Wales, the coast of England, its rivers and valleys, the antiquities of Scotland, the Rhine, the Alps - the list of his tours is almost a complete guide to picturesque travel from the turn of the century. He early developed an admiration for Claude Lorrain, Claude Joseph Vernet, and especially Philip James de Loutherbourg, the father of Drury Lane picturesque; they appealed to Turner's taste for the melodramatic with their paintings of avalanches, storms, shipwrecks, and conflagrations.
Relationship with Royal Academy
At the Royal Academy, Turner had been taught that the highest aim of an artist was to become a history painter illustrating the most heroic themes of the Bible, antiquity, and modern history. But he did not rely primarily on narrative association to elevate his landscapes. From the late 1790s he exhibited paintings with quotations from his favorite poets, including Thomson, Milton, and Ossian. In 1812 he showed at the Royal Academy Hannibal Crossing the Alps with a quotation from his own projected long poem The Fallacies of Hope.
It is greatly to the credit of the Royal Academy that the career of this revolutionary painter was one of uninterrupted success. He first exhibited in 1790 at the age of 15, was elected associate royal academician in 1799 and royal academician in 1802, and became professor of perspective in 1807 and deputy president in 1845.
Nature Works
In 1819 Turner visited Venice for the first time. He had long outgrown the realism which made Calais Pier (1803) and The Shipwreck (1805) tour-de-force demonstrations of his technical powers, and in the second painting he translated the shipwreck into a romantic symbol of man at the mercy of the violence of nature. Even the watercolors made from his sketches on his first visit to the Alps in 1802 are firmly controlled by observation and his scientific interest in geology. The liberating impact of Turner's experiences in Venice took some time to develop, for the majority of pencil sketches, of which he made large quantities during his short stay, are shorthand notations of meticulous accuracy.
Turner went even further than the impressionists later in abstracting light and color from his vision of nature, but unlike them he was principally interested in capturing transient effects under different conditions. He relied on a prodigious and highly trained visual memory in addition to his sketches. A Mrs. Simon recorded that during a rainstorm in 1843 he put his head out of a train window for nearly 9 minutes and shut his eyes in intense concentration for a quarter of an hour. The following year he exhibited Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway, which has been described as a salute to the new railway age. It is in marked contrast to the Fighting Téméraire (1839), a painting of the veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar being tugged on its last journey to be broken up, which Ruskin said was the most pathetic picture ever painted. Turner's last paintings on classical themes, from Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829) to Hero and Leander (1837), are even more subjective orchestrations of color, although equally the outcome of his phenomenological studies.
Personal Characteristics
Turner died on Dec. 19, 1851, and was buried as a national hero in St. Paul's Cathedral. He left a fortune of more than £140, 000 to found a charity for "Decayed Artists" and a vast hoard of sketches and his finest paintings, many of which he had bought back to leave to the nation. But his will was faultily drafted, and it was successfully contested by distant and probably disliked relatives. Only the paintings reached the destination he had intended, and the greatest of them are on permanent display in the Tate Gallery, London.
Much of Turner's life was a well-kept secret, including his relations with a widow, Sarah Danby, by whom he allegedly had two daughters. His short figure and beaklike face lent themselves to caricature, but he cut a not undistinguished figure in the academy and the social circles in which he chose to move - a few wealthy friends who were connoisseurs of art and a larger number of casual acquaintances among the uneducated, for he relished low life. His vulgarity of pronunciation was probably cultivated, for it gave flavor to his brusque humor. In his last years he lived the life of a recluse under an assumed name in Chelsea.
Turner the Visionary
The reputation of Turner has suffered from both his virtuosity and the baroque cast of his imagination. Lord Clark, not an unsympathetic critic, has castigated, in Landscape into Art (1949), the antics of his reckless technique, the badness of what survives of his unfinished poem, and the ugliness of some of his favorite forms. The key to Turner's imaginative authenticity is probably to be found in his boyhood responses to literature as well as nature. His eye never ceased to make new discoveries, so to look at Turner is always to see nature afresh. He was also a visionary, and it is the visionary in Turner that makes his greatest paintings haunt the imagination.
Further Reading
From John Ruskin, who chose Turner as the central hero of volume 1 (1843) of his Modern Painters, to Lord Clark, Turner has occasioned fine criticism. The scholarly literature is disappointing. Alexander J. Finberg, The Life of J. M. W. Turner (1939; revised by Hilda F. Finberg, 1961), is a mine of facts, based on monumental research. Jack Lindsay, J. M. W. Turner: His Life and Work (1966), is controversial but worth reading for many original ideas and for its bibliography. The best short account is Lawrence Gowing, Turner: Imagination and Reality (1966), which also has a useful bibliography. See also Michael Kitson, J. M. W. Turner (1964), and John Rothenstein and Martin Butlin, Turner (1964). The best modern authorities are John Gage and Martin Butlin, who have hitherto confined their research mainly to specialist studies.
| British History: Joseph Mallord William Turner |
Turner, Joseph Mallord William (1775-1851). British land- and seascape artist. Born in London the son of a barber, Turner was precociously talented. He entered the RA Schools in 1789, had a drawing exhibited at the academy in 1790, and was elected a full academician in 1802. He became professor of perspective in 1807. A prolific artist of amazing range of subject and style, he began work in water-colours, quickly founding both a reputation and a fortune, which made him independent of changing public taste. His work was not appreciated by everyone, but his supporters included Thomas Lawrence, John Ruskin, and the earl of Egremont, whose large collection at Petworth (Sussex) now belongs to the National Trust. He died in eccentric obscurity under a false name.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Joseph Mallord William Turner |
In 1802, Turner made a trip to the Continent, where he painted his famous Calais Pier (National Gall., London). From then on he traveled constantly in England or abroad, making innumerable direct sketches from which he drew material for his studio paintings in oil and watercolor. Turner showed a remarkable ability to distill the best from the tradition of landscape painting and he helped to further elevate landscape (and seascape) as important artistic subject matter. The influence of the Dutch masters is apparent in his Sun Rising through Vapor (National Gall., London). In the vein of the French classical landscape painter, Claude Lorrain, he produced the Liber Studiorum (1807-19), 70 drawings that were later reproduced by engraving under Turner's supervision. Among the paintings evocative of Claude's style are his Dido Building Carthage (National Gall., London) and Crossing the Brook (Tate Gall., London). Despite his early and continued success Turner lived the life of a recluse. As his fame grew he maintained a large gallery in London for exhibition of his work, but continued to live quietly with his elderly father.
Turner's painting became increasingly abstract as he strove to portray light, space, and the elemental forces of nature. In fact, some of his modern admirers have noted that the true subjects of his late paintings are the radiance of light and the vitality of paint itself. Characteristic of his later period are such paintings as The Fighting Téméraire and Rain, Steam, and Speed (both: National Gall., London). His late Venetian works, which describe atmospheric effects with brighter colors, include The Grand Canal (Metropolitan Mus.) and Approach to Venice (National Gall., Washington, D.C.). Turner encountered violent criticism as his style became increasingly free, but he was passionately defended by Sir Thomas Lawrence and the youthful Ruskin. Visionary, revolutionary, and extremely influential, these late paintings laid the groundwork for impressionism, postimpressionism, abstract expressionism, color-field painting, and a myriad of other art movements of the late 19th and 20th cents. Turner's will, which was under litigation for many years, left more than 19,000 watercolors, drawings, and oils to the British nation. Most of these works are in the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, London. Many of Turner's oils have deteriorated badly.
Bibliography
See his watercolors (ed. by M. Butlin, 1962); catalog by A. J. Finberg (1968); biographies by A. J. Finberg (2d ed. 1961), J. Lindsay (1966), A. Bailey (1998), J. Woodhouse (2000), and J. Hamilton (2003); studies by J. Rothenstein and M. Butlin (1964), L. Gowing (1966), J. Gage (1969), and W. Gaunt (1971); M. Butlin and E. Joll, The Paintings and Drawings of J. W. M. Turner (1987); W. S. Rodner, J. M. W. Turner: Romantic Painter of the Industrial Revolution (1997); G. Finley, Angel in the Sun: Turner's Vision of History (1999); I. Warrell, Turner and Venice (2004).
| Fine Arts Dictionary: Turner, Joseph Mallord William |
An English romantic painter (see
| Wikipedia: J. M. W. Turner |
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This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (November 2009) |
| J. M. W. Turner | |
 Self portrait, oil on canvas, circa 1799 |
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| Born | 23 April 1775 Covent Garden, London, England |
| Died | 19 December 1851 (aged 76) Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London, England |
| Nationality | English |
| Field | Painting |
| Training | Royal Academy of Art |
| Movement | Romanticism |
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA (23 April 1775[1] – 19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting.[2] Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolour landscape painting. He is commonly known as "the painter of light".[3]
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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.[4] His mother, Mary Marshall, became increasingly mentally unstable, possibly due in part to the early death of Turner's younger sister, Helen Turner, in 1786. Mary Marshall died in 1804, after having been committed in 1799 to the Bethlem Royal Hospital, a mental asylum otherwise known as 'Bedlam'.
Possibly due to the load placed on the family by these problems, the young Turner was sent to stay with his maternal uncle in Brentford in 1785, 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 attended a school in Margate on the north-east Kent coast. 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,[5] and was accepted into the academy a year later. Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy, chaired the panel that admitted him. At first Turner showed a keen interest in architecture but was advised to continue painting by the architect Thomas Hardwick (junior). A watercolour by Turner 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.
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. On a visit to Lyme Regis, in Dorset, England, he painted a stormy scene (now in the Cincinnati Art Museum).
Important support for his work 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 to through his career. 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 George O'Brien Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont at Petworth House in West Sussex and painted scenes that Egremont funded taken from the grounds of the house and of the Sussex countryside, including a view of the Chichester Canal. 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 his two daughters by Sarah Danby were born in 1801 and 1811.
He died in the house of his mistress Sophia Caroline Booth in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea on 19 December 1851. He is said to have uttered the last words "The sun is God" before expiring.[6] 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 in charge of making 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."
Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised 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 recognised 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 watercolour 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's major venture into printmaking was the Liber Studiorum (Book of Studies), a set of seventy prints that the artist worked on from 1806 to 1819. The Liber Studiorum was an expression of his intentions for landscape art. Loosely based on Claude Lorrain's Liber Veritatis (Book of Truth), the plates were meant to be widely disseminated, and categorised the genre into six types: Marine, Mountainous, Pastoral, Historical, Architectural, and Elevated or Epic Pastoral. [7]
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 amid 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 this period. 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.
His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), 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 watercolour 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.[8]
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.
High levels of ash in the atmosphere during 1816 the "Year Without a Summer," led to unusually spectacular sunsets during this period, and 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:
On one of his trips to Europe he met the Irish physician Robert James Graves. 'Graves was travelling in a diligence in the Alps when a man who looked like the mate of a ship got in, sat beside him, and soon took from his pocket a note-book across which his hand from time to time passed with the rapidity of lightning. Graves wondered if the man was insane, he looked, saw that the stranger had been noting the forms of clouds as they passed and that he was no common artist. The two travelled and sketched together for months. Graves tells that Turner would outline a scene, sit doing nothing for two or three days, then suddenly, 'perhaps on the third day he would exclaim 'there it is', and seizing his colours work rapidly till he had noted down the peculiar effect he wished to fix in his memory.'
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 unseen through an intermediary, his friend C. R. Leslie. From among the paintings Turner had on hand and was willing to sell for £500, Leslie selected and shipped the 1832 atmospheric seascape Staffa, Fingal's Cave.[9] 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 forte." Staffa, Fingal's Cave is currently owned by the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
Turner left a small fortune which he hoped would be used to support what he called "decayed artists". His will was contested and in 1856, after a court battle, part of his fortune was awarded to his first cousins including Thomas Price Turner.[10] Another portion of the money went to the Royal Academy of Arts, which does not now 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.[11]
A prestigious annual art award, the Turner Prize, created in 1984, was named in Turner's honour, and twenty years later the 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 organised by the BBC.[12]
In October 2005 Professor Harold Livermore, its owner for 60 years, gave Sandycombe Lodge, the villa at Twickenham which Turner designed and built for himself, to the Sandycombe Lodge Trust to be preserved as a monument to the artist. In 2006 he additionally gave some land to the Trust which had been part of Turner's domaine. The organisation The Friends of Turner's House was formed in 2004 to support it.
In April 2006, Christie's New York auctioned Giudecca, La Donna Della Salute and San Giorgio, a view of Venice exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1841, for US$35.8 million, setting a new record for a Turner. The New York Times stated that according to two sources who had requested anonymity the buyer was casino magnate Stephen Wynn.
In 2006, Turner's Glaucus and Scylla (1840) was returned by Kimbell Art Museum to the heirs of John and Anna Jaffe after a Holocaust Claim was made.[13] The painting was repurchased by the Kimbell for $5.7 million at a sale by Christie's in April 2007.[14][15]
Between 1 October 2007 and 21 September 2008, the first major exhibit of Turner's works in the United States in over forty years came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Dallas Museum of Art. It included over 140 paintings, more than half of which were from the Tate.
An art gallery known as the Turner Contemporary is being built in Margate to celebrate the association of the artist with the town.[16]
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