Joseph Mallord William Turner

Regarded as a national treasure, Joseph Mallord William Turner was an English Romantic painter, printmaker, and watercolourist, renowned for his expressive landscapes and turbulent marine paintings. Born in 1775 in Covent Garden, London, Turner demonstrated exceptional artistic talent from a young age. He entered the Royal Academy of Arts at just 14, and by 15, he had his first watercolour accepted for the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.

J.M.W. Turner is widely celebrated for his innovative use of light and colour, which often imbued his works with a dramatic and emotional intensity. His early works were detailed and realistic, but as his style evolved, he embraced a more expressive and atmospheric approach, influencing the later development of Impressionism.

Turner maintained a strict artistic routine for most of his adult life. He toured the British countryside each summer, making plein air sketches and watercolours of dramatic views — such as his rendering of Norham Castle in Northumberland, which sold at Christie’s London in 2017 for £581,000. He spent the winter months in his studio, producing oil paintings based on these preparatory works. This practice freed him from London and the academic traditions he found stifling.

Fishermen at Sea (1796, Tate Britain, London), Turner’s first oil work to be exhibited at the Royal Academy, in 1796, signalled the breadth of the artist’s ambitions as well as his technical virtuosity. It also generated a flurry of commissions from wealthy patrons such as Richard Colt Hoare, who owned the Stourhead Estate in Wiltshire, England, and William Beckford, who requested landscape paintings of his Gothic palace, Fonthill, also in Wiltshire.

By 1804, when he was just 29 years old, Turner had opened his own gallery in London’s Harley Street, where he displayed both his early ambitious atmospheric landscapes and smaller, more intimate English pastoral scenes. This unorthodox, self-promoting approach proved a hit with important collectors, who offered Turner the run of their stately homes. Upon visiting the Harley Street gallery, the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova declared Turner a genius.

Turner experimented with unusual compositions, eschewing his brush in favour of a palette knife or even his thumb to scrape and smudge the surface of his works. The record-breaking Giudecca La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio, which sold at Christie’s New York for US$35,856,000 in 2006, was painted almost entirely with a knife.

J.M.W. Turner died in 1851. His body was interred at St. Paul’s Cathedral, where he had arranged to be buried alongside his ‘Brothers in Art’, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Thomas Lawrence.

The leading Victorian critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most ‘stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of nature’. By 1910 a wing of the National Gallery of British Art (now Tate Britain) housed his national bequest (in 1987 the collection was moved to the dedicated Clore Gallery in the same building).

In 1984 the annual Turner Prize was named in his honour, and in 2011 the Turner Contemporary gallery opened in Margate, celebrating the association between the artist and the seaside town. In 2016, Turner’s image was chosen by the Bank of England to appear on the new £20 note, honouring his profound contribution to British art.