Turner, J.M.W.

▪ English painter

Introduction

in full  Joseph Mallord William 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.

Early life and works

      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 (Cozens, John Robert). The influence of Cozens and of the Welsh landscape painter Richard Wilson (Wilson, Richard) 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 (Royal Academy of Arts), 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 (Poussin, Nicolas), Claude Lorrain, Aelbert Cuyp (Cuyp, Aelbert), 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.

      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.

      Turner's many marine subjects, in which he dramatically builds upon the foundation of the Dutch 17th-century tradition, reveal his methodical attempt to master every landscape style he admired and the ease with which he accomplished this. The rivalry he felt with painters who had influenced his style (Poussin, Nicolas) is suggested by his bequest to the National Gallery of his Dido Building Carthage, or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire (1815) and Sun Rising Through Vapour: Fishermen Cleaning and Selling Fish (1807) on condition that they be hung beside his two favourite Claudes. However, the treatment of landscape in the Thames oil sketches of about 1805 and in The Shipwreck (1805) suggests that at this time Turner was developing his original approach to landscape—emphasizing luminosity, atmosphere, and Romantic, dramatic subjects.

      In 1807 Turner began his great enterprise of publishing a series of 100 plates known as the Liber Studiorum, inspired, in part, by Claude's own studio record, Liber veritatis (begun in 1635 and continued until his death in 1682). Turner's aim was to document the great variety and range of landscape; some of the subjects were taken from his own existing paintings and watercolours. He employed several engravers, although he supervised the work at every stage, etched some of the plates himself, and made innumerable preparatory drawings. The publication was issued in parts consisting of five plates each and covering all the styles of landscape composition, including historical, architectural, mountainous, pastoral, and marine. The first part appeared in June 1807 and the last in 1819, when Turner evidently lost interest in the project and abandoned it after the publication of 71 plates.

Middle years

      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 Dortrecht: The Dort Packet Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed (1817–18), 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.

Later life and works

 In the later years of his life, Turner was more famous, rich, and secretive than ever. After several years of inactivity as professor of perspective at the Royal Academy, he resigned in 1838. By 1846 he owned a house by the river at Chelsea, where he lived with a widow, Sophia Caroline Booth, assuming her surname. Turner continued to travel. In the last 15 years of his life, he visited Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and France. Observers have recorded the untiring energy with which he sketched while abroad, and the drawings, numbering about 19,000 in the Turner Bequest, bear witness to this labour.

      While Turner's earlier paintings and drawings show the most accurate observation of architectural and natural detail, in his later work this precision is sacrificed to general effects of colour and light with the barest indication of mass. His composition tends to become more fluid, suggesting movement and space; some of his paintings are mere colour notations, barely tinted on a white ground, such as Norham Castle, Sunrise and Sunrise, with a Boat Between Headlands (both from c. 1840–50). This approach may account for the large number of slightly brushed-in canvases found in Turner's studio at the time of his death. These colourful abstractions are often more appreciated at the turn of the 21st century than the historical and mythological subjects he exhibited.

 Apart from fanciful reconstructions of ancient Rome and the scintillating Venetian cityscapes, which found ready purchasers in his day, the outstanding examples of his late work are The ‘Fighting Téméraire' Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up, 1838 (1839), a tribute to the passing age of sailing ships as they were about to be replaced by steam-powered vessels, and Rain, Steam, and Speed—the Great Western Railway (1844), which expresses Turner's intense interest in the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution. The first of his pictures to be hung in Britain's National Gallery was the opalescent The Dogana, San Giorgio Citella, from the Steps of the Europa (1842), presented in 1847, while Turner was still alive. Turner's preoccupation with the dramatic elements of fire and water appears in the two versions of Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (1835), in the large sketch A Fire at Sea (c. 1835), and in Rockets and Blue Lights (1840).

      Turner died in Chelsea in 1851 and was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. By his will he intended to leave most of his fortune of £140,000 to found a charity for “decayed artists,” and he bequeathed his finished paintings to the National Gallery, on condition that a separate gallery be built to exhibit them. As a result of protracted litigation with his rather distant relatives, most of the money reverted to them, while both finished and unfinished paintings and drawings became national property as the Turner Bequest. It was not until 1908 that a special gallery was built by Sir Joseph Duveen (Duveen of Millbank, Joseph Duveen, Baron) to house some of the oil paintings at the Tate Gallery. All the drawings and watercolours were transferred to the British Museum for safety after the River Thames flood of 1928, when the storerooms at the Tate Gallery were inundated, but they were returned to the Tate Gallery on the opening of the Clore Gallery, an addition designed by James Stirling expressly for that purpose, in 1987. A few of the oil paintings remain at the National Gallery.

Assessment

      Turner was perhaps the greatest landscapist of the 19th century. Although brought up in the academic traditions of the 18th century, he became a pioneer in the study of light, colour, and atmosphere. He anticipated the French Impressionists (Impressionism) in breaking down conventional formulas of representation; but, unlike them, he believed that his works should always express significant historical, mythological, literary, or other narrative themes. A line of development can be traced from his early historical landscapes that form settings for important human subjects to his later concentration on the dramatic aspects of sea and sky. Even without figures, these late works are expressions of important subjects: the relationship of man to his environment, the power of nature as manifested in the terror of the storm or the beneficence of the sun. Unmatched in his time in the range of his development, Turner was also unrivaled in the breadth of his subject matter and the searching innovation of his stylistic treatment.

      Early in the 19th century, Turner was strongly criticized by conservative critics for his dynamic compositions and high-keyed colour. By the end of his life, although his Venetian subjects and more finished watercolours still appealed to some purchasers, his concern with atmospheric effects had developed along lines that departed from the trend in contemporary taste for realism and high finish, typified by the popularity of complex narrative painting. Turner's growing reputation in the second half of the 19th century was in fact largely due to the championship of the influential English art critic John Ruskin (Ruskin, John), who published the first part of Modern Painters in 1843 to prove Turner's superiority to all previous landscape painters and to extol his accurate rendering of natural appearance. In the 20th century a new appreciation of the abstract qualities of Turner's late colour compositions strengthened his status as one of the most innovative and technically gifted painters of his century.

Martin R.F. Butlin Mary Chamot Ed.

Additional Reading

A.J. Fingerg, The Life of J.M.W. Turner, R.A., 2nd ed., rev. (1961), is still the standard life but lacks documentation and excludes references to Turner's personal life. Jack Lindsay, J.M.W. Turner: His Life and Work (1966; reissued 1971), approaches Turner the man, although it overstresses sociological, political, and psychological aspects. Fuller and more balanced accounts appear in James Hamilton, Turner: A Life (1997); and Anthony Bailey, Standing in the Sun: A Life of J.M.W. Turner (1997). Surveys of Turner's work include Lawrence Gowing, Turner: Imagination and Reality (1966), an exhibition catalog emphasizing the more modern aspect of Turner's later style; and Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J.M.W. Turner (1979), which includes a catalog of the watercolours outside the Turner Bequest, and Turner in his Time (1987), which includes particularly useful chronologies. More interpretive catalogs, which perhaps overemphasize the intellectual content of Turner's works, are John Gage, Color in Turner: Poetry and Truth (1969), and J.M.W. Turner: A Wonderful Range of Mind (1987; reissued 1991); Eric Shanes, Turner's Human Landscape (1990); and Gerald Finley, Angel in the Sun (1999). A complete catalog of Turner's oil paintings is Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, rev. ed., 2 vol. (1984). Turner's drawings are reproduced and discussed in Gerald Wilkinson, Turner's Early Sketchbooks (1972), for the years 1789–1802, Turner Sketches, 1802–20 (1974), and Turner's Colour Sketches, 1820–34 (1975). His engravings are discussed in Luke Herrmann, Turner Prints (1990). Turner's travels are covered in John Russell and Andrew Wilton, Turner in Switzerland (1976); Cecilia Powell, Turner in the South: Rome, Naples, Florence (1987); and David Hill, In Turner's Footsteps: Through the Hills and Dales of Northern England (1984; reissued 1993), Turner in the Alps (1991), Turner on the Thames: River Journeys in the Year 1805 (1993), and Turner in the North: A Tour Through Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Durham, Northumberland, the Scottish Borders, the Lake District, Lancashire, and Lincolnshire in the Year 1797 (1996). Particular aspects of Turner's work are also covered in a series of books published to accompany exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, including Cecilia Powell, Turner's Rivers of Europe: The Rhine, Meuse and Mosel (1991), and Turner in Germany (1995); Ian Warrell, Through Switzerland with Turner: Ruskin's First Selection from the Turner Bequest (1995), Turner on the Loire (1997), and Turner on the Seine (1999); Fred G.H. Bachrach, Turner's Holland (1994); the watercolours for two important engraving projects are covered by Eric Shanes, Turner's Picturesque Views in England and Wales, 1825–1838 (1979; reissued 1983), and Turner's Rivers, Harbours, and Coasts (1981); Lindsay Stainton, Turner's Venice (1985); and Martin Butlin, Mollie Luther, and Ian Warrell, Turner at Petworth: Painter & Patron (1989). Articles in the periodical Turner Studies (1981–91) cover all aspects of his art and life and offer historical context.

* * *