Joseph Mallord William Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), English painter and watercolourist. He was the predominant figure in English landscape painting in the first half of the 19th century and is particularly noted for his exploration of the effects of light, which had considerable influence on later 19th-century painters such as Monet and Pissarro, and other Impressionists.

Turner was born in London, the son of a barber and wig-maker. In the late 1780s he was given lessons in perspective by the watercolourist and draughtsman Thomas Malton and, showing a precocious talent, he entered the Royal Academy schools at the age of 14. His first exhibited works—watercolours of architectural subjects such as the Archbishop’s Palace, Lambeth—date from 1790 and his earliest exhibited oil painting—Fishermen at Sea (Tate Gallery, London)—from 1796. In 1793 Turner became acquainted with the art lover Dr Thomas Monro, and at Monro’s house collaborated with Thomas Girtin in copying landscapes by John Robert Cozens, a leading watercolourist of the mid-18th century. Turner’s talent attracted the notice of several aristocratic patrons, such as the Earl of Essex and the Earl of Harewood, who commissioned topographical views of their estates. In the late 1790s he also undertook several sketching tours throughout northern England and Wales, producing views of cathedrals, castles, abbeys, and bridges. These works, such as Dolbadarn Castle, North Wales (1802, Royal Academy of Arts, London), which Turner presented as his diploma piece to become a full Royal Academician in 1802, show the influence of the sublime landscapes of the English painter Richard Wilson and the artist’s own developing interest in the effects of natural light.

After his visits to France (where he studied the works of Old Masters in the Louvre) and to Switzerland in 1802, Turner’s work became increasingly ambitious. As well as numerous watercolour studies of Chamonix and Lake Geneva, he produced such famous works as Calais Pier (1803, National Gallery, London) and Shipwreck (1805, Tate Gallery, London)—dramatic, stormy seascapes imitating the style of 17th-century Dutch marine painters. The works of Claude Lorrain also had a major impact on Turner’s art, particularly on his historical paintings, for example Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812, Tate Gallery, London) and Dido Building Carthage (1815, National Gallery, London).

In 1804 Turner opened his own gallery behind his house in Harley Street, central London, although he continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy. In a further attempt to promote his work he began in 1807 the Liber Studiorum, a series of engravings of his works modelled on Claude’s Liber Veritatis. The plates, published until 1819, featured the whole of Turner’s range—historical, mountainous, pastoral, marine, and topographical subjects. He was also elected Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy in 1807, a post he held until 1837.

Turner’s work from the 1810s is particularly distinctive for its use of light tones and white instead of earth-coloured grounds, a tendency that led to Turner and his followers being given the derogatory term the “white painters” by reactionary critics. Turner’s preference for a palette dominated by glowing whites and yellows increased after his visit to Italy in 1819 and further tours to Germany, Rome, and Venice in the 1820s and 1830s. The brilliant, saturated colour and rich brushwork inspired by the Venetian painters whom Turner admired are particularly evident in such works as Ulysses Mocking Polyphemus (1829, National Gallery, London) and his famous dreamlike views of Venice, such as The Grand Canal and The View of the Piazzetta (both 1835, Tate Gallery, London). The same style is used in his topographical watercolours and gouaches, dominated by touches of saturated colour, such as the series Rivers of England and Wales (published as mezzotints, 1823-1827) and the unfinished Rivers of Europe (1833-1835).

Other important works of the 1830s include views of Petworth, Sussex, the home of Turner’s patron the Earl of Egremont. The earl commissioned Turner to paint four decorative panels, including two views of the park, for the dining room, but Turner also made many paintings, drawings, and sketches of the rooms of the house and its social life. Interior at Petworth (c. 1837, Tate Gallery, London), in which the architecture and figures are barely discernible, shows how subject matter in Turner’s late work was secondary to his attempts to express the effects of light and movement and the nuances of atmosphere. This is also seen in his other major paintings of the 1830s and 1840s, such as Snowstorm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842, Tate Gallery, London) and Rain, Steam, and Speed (1844, National Gallery, London)—the latter illustrating his efforts to apply his style to representation of modern rather than historical subjects.

Although denigrated by most art critics during his lifetime, Turner was much admired and praised by his artistic colleagues and defended in particular by John Ruskin. Ruskin’s survey of landscape painting in Modern Painters, in which Turner was the dominant figure, increased public appreciation of Turner’s work after it was published in 1843. Turner himself was not modest about his own talents and position in the history of English painting and intended in his will to leave all his finished oil paintings to the nation. After his death, however, the will was contested by his family and, by a settlement of 1856, all works in the artist’s possession—some 300 paintings and over 20,000 drawings—were donated to the National Gallery in London. From 1897 they were displayed at the Tate Gallery, London, and, from 1987, in the Clore Gallery, a purpose-built extension of the Tate Gallery that is devoted to the Turner Collection.