J. M. W. Turner

English painter

• Born: April 23, 1775
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: December 19, 1851
• Place of death: London, England

The outstanding revolutionary painter of landscapes, Turner was a Romantic. With the vast complexity of his work, he has been called the Shakespeare of English art. He was an artist far ahead of his time and remains without equal in depicting the sea in all of its moods.

Early Life

Joseph Mallord William Turner was the son of a barber and a wigmaker. His mother, Mary Marshall, was some six years older than his father, William. Although he is said to have been the eldest son in the family, there are no extant references to other children, except for a sister three years younger, Mary Ann, who died when Turner was eleven.

Turner’s mother was apparently subject to fits of manic rage. When she was in her early sixties, she was committed to Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane in December, 1800—by neighbors, not by family members—and died there in April, 1804. Biographers have frequently attributed Turner’s problems with women and his fascination with nature in its most violent phases to his mother’s influence. As he left no journals or autobiography, his own thoughts on this subject, as on others, remain unknown. Only his words in reported conversations are available.

Turner’s father, who, Turner said, never praised him except for saving a shilling, exhibited his son’s drawings in the shop window and boasted that his son would become a painter. After the death of Mary Turner, William Turner served as his son’s factotum until his death in 1829 at the age of eighty-five.

From childhood, Turner was completely absorbed with capturing on paper what his eye saw and his mind perceived and imagined. His relations considered him inarticulate and found him ungrateful because he failed to write thank-you notes. As a child, he knew the urban life of London, the shipping on the Thames, the open sea at Margate (the subject of some of his earliest and last drawings), and the rural scene at Brentford, where he stayed with an uncle and attended the Free School as a day boarder in 1786.

Turner took lessons from Thomas Malton, a watercolor painter of architectural studies, and in December of 1789, he was admitted as a student at the Royal Academy school, where he studied for four years. His first exhibit at the Royal Academy was a watercolor in 1790, and in March, 1793, he was awarded the “Greater Silver Pallet” for landscape painting by the Society of Arts. He was employed by Dr. Thomas Monro to copy drawings by John Robert Cozens and other artists during the evenings. He exhibited his first oil painting—Fishermen at Sea —at the Royal Academy in 1796. In 1799, Turner was elected an associate of the school and left his parents’ home, taking lodgings in Harley Street. In 1802, Turner was elected a full member of the Royal Academy at the youngest age possible.

Turner was a very short man, so short that when walking and holding a presumably not large fish by its gills, its tail dragged on the ground, as did the bottom of Turner’s frock coat. When prevailed upon to paint his self-portrait, Turner worried that his work would be devalued because of his appearance. He was a man of phenomenal energy and industry, routinely hiking twenty-five miles a day to sketch; who carried secrecy to extremes; and who was devoted to a small number of friends, including W. F. Wells and Walter Fawkes.

In 1799, Turner met Sarah Danby, a young widow with four children; although they were never married, they had two daughters, Evelina and Georgianna. Because Turner never spoke of his relationships with women—his mother; his sister; Sarah Danby; her niece, Hannah Danby; Sophia Booth, the second widow with whom he lived (1834 until his death)—his personal life is subject to much speculation. Nothing is known of Sarah Danby’s death, but it is likely that Turner’s relationship with her lasted into the 1820’s. In Turner’s will of 1829, he provided for each of his two daughters, for Sarah Danby, and for Hannah Danby. Assumptions abound, but probably names disappear from his subsequent wills simply because Turner outlived those individuals.

The only contemporary biography—by G. W. Thornbury, recognized as quite unreliable—portrayed Turner as a miser and accused him of “wallowing in Wapping” (the brothel district). Although Turner was indeed concerned with money— which he saw as his only means of pursuing his artistic ambition—there is evidence that he was frequently generous and in no way mean-spirited, much less vulgar, despite his Cockney accent. He did go to Wapping to collect rents. If his figure drawings came from Wapping, this will never be known for certain, because his champion, John Ruskin, destroyed these drawings, which he pronounced obscene, after Turner’s death.

Life’s Work

Turner’s life’s work, his art, was his life: No separation is possible. If his relationships with women remain a mystery, it is nevertheless clear that his life was consumed by his practice of his art. When he died, he left to his nation, on condition that a gallery be built to house his work, three hundred oil paintings and twenty thousand watercolors and drawings, which did not include the hundreds of oils and watercolors already in private collections. There are also more than two hundred bound sketchbooks in the British Museum.

Turner became an expert architectural and topographical draftsman, and there is an underlying sense of structure even in his late abstract work. He sketched from nature all of his life and intently studied the work of others. It was as if he had to conquer the artistic method and achievement of every previous artist in order to find his own mode of expression. After his election to membership in the Royal Academy, Turner made his first trip to France and Switzerland (he had already made many sketching tours in England and Wales). His paintings have been cataloged in terms of his trips to Europe that he continued up to the age of seventy.

There are 318 oil paintings in the Turner bequest and more than two hundred in private collections. Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll divide his paintings into five periods: 1793-1802, before Turner went abroad; 1803-1819, before he made his first trip to Italy; 1819-1829, before he made his second trip to Italy; works painted in Rome, 1828-1829; and 1829-1851, his later works—with the second and fifth the largest groups. Turner’s work was viewed with increasing bewilderment. The Fifth Plague of Egypt was Turner’s first historical subject and was well received. Calais Pier , Sun Rising Through Vapour , and The Battle of Trafalgar elicited negative comment. Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps was well received and exemplifies Turner’s very different approach to historical painting with nature playing the dominant role. Dido Building Carthage and Sun Rising Through Vapour were finally offered to the National Gallery in Turner’s will, on the condition that they be hung permanently next to two of Claude Lorrain’s paintings.

Turner remained ever cognizant of his duty to the Royal Academy, which he viewed as the mother of all British artists. He put aside his inclination to withdraw into his work to meet all of his responsibilities as a member. He was proud of his appointment as a professor of perspective in 1807—frequently signing his work RA, PP. He did not, however, deliver any lectures until 1811, when he had completed lengthy study and nearly two hundred large drawings and diagrams to demonstrate his points. His lectures were unintelligible; often he seemed to be laughing at some private joke. He did not resign his position until 1837, although his last lectures were in 1828. His work sold consistently, much of it on commission, first at the Royal Academy and later in his own galleries.

Turner valued poetry and read widely, appending words from James Thomson, Mark Akenside, Edward Young, and John Milton to his paintings. Beginning in 1812, he used lines from his own unpublished poem, “Fallacies of Hope,” which are of interest only because they are Turner’s. He did illustrations for Sir Walter Scott, and in 1834, his illustrations of Lord Byron’s poems were exhibited. However, with all of Turner’s travel on the Continent, he never learned French, German, or Italian, for words were never his medium. He was apparently completely unaware of the political upheaval around him, but he knew the conditions of the roads.

The Liber Studiorum (1807-1819) constitutes a text without words on the expressive power and scope inherent in landscape art. W. F. Wells, one of Turner’s best friends, persuaded him to begin these engravings in 1806; the first volume was published in 1807 and the last in 1819. Turner published these engravings at his own expense and marked each of the seventy-one plates in one of six ways: as pastoral, epic or elevated pastoral, marine, architectural, mountainous, or historical. These engravings are in mezzotint on copper and printed in dark brown. The Liber Studiorum is an unequaled compendium of landscape styles.

Turner was sufficiently self-reliant that the harsh, sometimes venomous, criticism of his work did not deter him. Sir George Beaumont and Blackwood’s Magazine remained hostile, and Turner was accused of having an optical disease and was frequently pronounced insane. He rarely said anything critical about his fellow artists and never made any attempt to respond to negative criticism. When the young middle-class John Ruskin met the sixty-year-old bohemian artist for the first time and called him the Great Angel of the Apocalypse, Turner was considerably taken aback.

Turner was no purist in method, but would use any means to achieve the truth he sought. Although he used constant sketches as a basis for his drawings, watercolors, engravings, and paintings, his finished works were not intended to represent the optical truth of the moment in terms of light or weather (Claude Monet found Turner antipathetic), but rather his own inspiration. His two oils of the fire in 1834 at the Houses of Parliament are visionary, not realistic. Turner placed his Juliet in Venice rather than Verona because he was in love with the former city (Juliet and Her Nurse ). In The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up and Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway , Turner shows his fascination with humankind’s battle to control nature, however pessimistic he might have been about the future of humanity. The imagery in Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying , Peace: Burial at Sea , and Death on a Pale Horse is indubitably powerful and without equal in British art.

Toward the end of Turner’s life, when he was living with Sophia Booth in a house he had purchased in her name (and was letting people in the area call him Puggy or Admiral Booth), he lost his teeth, and a false set would not help. He subsisted on two quarts of milk and an equal amount of rum a day.

In his will, Turner bequeathed his finished work to the nation on condition that a gallery be built and gave most of his large fortune to what was to be a charity to support poor male artists of legitimate British issue. Because his father’s relatives contested the will and his executors failed to protest, the latter never happened. No distinction was ever made between his finished and his unfinished work— which he might not have wanted anyone to see—and the National Gallery received all of his work. Turner did want his work to be seen as a whole, so the meaning would be clear, but it was not until 1987 that the Turner Gallery next to the Tate opened its doors.

Significance

J. M. W. Turner may indeed be likened to William Shakespeare, for the richness of his exploration of humankind’s relationship with the environment is beyond measure. Only by mastering the difficulties of landscape could he free himself of society’s views and express himself. He was a poetic, not a scientific, painter. He was seeking a reality of his imagination, even though he drew from nature. After Turner, landscape painting could never again be regarded as inferior. In his late and abstract oils of an estate, Petworth, which he never exhibited, he had completely merged his technique in watercolor with his technique in oil. He perceived reality as constantly changing, as light and energy, and he saw light as color.

Although his landscapes have people, they are not the most prominent part of the works: He presents his human figures as he draws his viewers into his work, by his vortices. In attempting to present a comprehensive view of the world, he involved in his art the interaction of nature and humanity. He drew from mythology, history, poetry, contemporary events, and his own private poetry, the subjects for his work. The apocryphal best he could say about art was that it was “a rum business.” Although he took enormous artistic license, his grasp of water, land, trees, mountains, masonry, ships, leaves, and fish was exact. However, only in Turner’s time is his The Angel Standing in the Sun even conceivable. What he offers finally is a vision of enchantment.

Because of his scope, Turner is difficult to comprehend as an artist; the label Romantic does not suffice any more than Elizabethan suffices for Shakespeare. It has been said that no other artist captured the landscape of Switzerland as Turner did. It has also been said, more remarkably in view of Italian art, that no other artist captured the light of Venice as Turner did. Elizabeth Rigby wrote that Turner “does what he will—others do what they can.” If Turner country is not to be located in any one geographical place, surely it is because Turner’s artistic vision is both rare and universal.

Bibliography

Butlin, Martin, and Evelyn Joll. The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner. 2 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977. Discusses each of Turner’s oil paintings—its origin, exhibition history, contemporary reviews—providing rare reproductions. Invaluable.

Hamilton, James. Turner. New York: Random House, 2003. Hamilton uses material contained in Turner’s sketchbook to describe the artist’s life and work, concluding that Turner owed his fame to opportunism as much as to talent.

Heffernan, James A. W. The Re-Creation of Landscape: A Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable, and Turner. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985. Argues that the literature of the two poets is not definable in terms of dynamic temporality nor the work of the two artists in terms of spatial fixity. Cogent and important.

Herrmann, Luke. Turner: Paintings, Watercolors, Prints and Drawings. London: Phaidon Press, 1975. Valuable data on the artist and his work, with reproductions and notes by a Turner scholar.

Joll, Evelyn, Martin Butlin, and Luke Herrmann, eds. The Oxford Companion to J. M. W. Turner. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2001. Contains more than 760 alphabetically arranged entries examining all aspects of Turner’s private and public lives, including his working methods, his influence on other artists, and the subjects and settings depicted in his art. Some entries are essay length, providing a good deal more than basic “ready reference” material.

Lindsay, Jack. Turner: The Man and His Art. New York: Franklin Watts, 1985. Provides valuable data on Turner’s life and place in English landscape art.

Paulson, Ronald. Literary Landscape: Turner and Constable. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982. A valuable discussion of the relation between landscape images and literary texts and Turner’s use of literary references, as opposed to John Constable’s suppression of the same.

Rosenblum, Robert. Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Traces a tradition from Romantics, such as Turner, to Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch during the late nineteenth century, to German expressionism and twentieth century abstract painters, such as Piet Mondrian.

Shanes, Eric. Turner: The Life and Masterworks. Rev., expanded and updated 3d ed. New York: Parkstone, 2004. An updated catalog from an exhibition of Turner’s watercolors, presented at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Several essays describe the importance of Turner’s watercolors within the context of his entire body of work, and how his watercolors influenced other painters. Also includes two hundred colored reproductions.

Turner, J. M. W. Collected Correspondence of J. M. W. Turner. Edited by John Gage. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1980. A thorough presentation of 342 of Turner’s generally brief letters.

Walker, John. Joseph Mallord William Turner. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1976. The most complete single volume on Turner, essential to any study of this artist.