55 Facts About JMW Turner

Joseph Mallord William JMW Turner, known in his time as William JMW Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist.

JMW Turner is known for his expressive colouring, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings.

JMW Turner was championed by the leading English art critic John Ruskin from 1840, and is today regarded as having elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting.

JMW Turner was born in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, to a modest lower-middle-class family.

JMW Turner lived in London all his life, retaining his Cockney accent and assiduously avoiding the trappings of success and fame.

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JMW Turner earned a steady income from commissions and sales, which due to his troubled, contrary nature, were often begrudgingly accepted.

JMW Turner opened his own gallery in 1804 and became professor of perspective at the academy in 1807, where he lectured until 1828.

JMW Turner travelled around Europe from 1802, typically returning with voluminous sketchbooks.

Intensely private, eccentric and reclusive, JMW Turner was a controversial figure throughout his career.

JMW Turner did not marry, but fathered two daughters, Evelina and Georgiana, by his housekeeper Sarah Danby.

JMW Turner became more pessimistic and morose as he got older, especially after the death of his father, when his outlook deteriorated, his gallery fell into disrepair and neglect, and his art intensified.

In 1841, JMW Turner rowed a boat into the Thames so he could not be counted as present at any property in that year's census.

JMW Turner lived in squalor and poor health from 1845, and died in London in 1851 aged 76.

JMW Turner's father William Turner was a barber and wig maker.

JMW Turner's mother showed signs of mental disturbance from 1785 and was admitted to St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics in Old Street in 1799.

JMW Turner's was moved in 1800 to Bethlem Hospital, a mental asylum, where she died in 1804.

JMW Turner was sent to his maternal uncle, Joseph Mallord William Marshall, a butcher in Brentford, then a small town on the banks of the River Thames west of London, where JMW Turner attended school.

The earliest known artistic exercise by JMW Turner is from this period—a series of simple colourings of engraved plates from Henry Boswell's Picturesque View of the Antiquities of England and Wales.

JMW Turner's father boasted to the artist Thomas Stothard that: "My son, sir, is going to be a painter".

In 1789, JMW Turner again stayed with his uncle who had retired to Sunningwell .

Many early sketches by JMW Turner were architectural studies or exercises in perspective, and it is known that, as a young man, he worked for several architects including Thomas Hardwick, James Wyatt and Joseph Bonomi the Elder.

JMW Turner learned from him the basic tricks of the trade, copying and colouring outline prints of British castles and abbeys.

JMW Turner entered the Royal Academy of Art in 1789, aged 14, and was accepted into the academy a year later by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

JMW Turner showed an early interest in architecture, but was advised by Hardwick to focus on painting.

JMW Turner exhibited watercolours each year at the academy while painting in the winter and travelling in the summer widely throughout Britain, particularly to Wales, where he produced a wide range of sketches for working up into studies and watercolours.

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In 1796, JMW Turner exhibited Fishermen at Sea, his first oil painting for the academy, of a nocturnal moonlit scene of the Needles off the Isle of Wight, an image of boats in peril.

JMW Turner travelled widely in Europe, starting with France and Switzerland in 1802 and studying in the Louvre in Paris in the same year.

JMW Turner was so attracted to Otley and the surrounding area that he returned to it throughout his career.

JMW Turner was 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.

JMW Turner had few close friends except for his father, who lived with him for 30 years and worked as his studio assistant.

JMW Turner never married but had a relationship with an older widow, Sarah Danby.

JMW Turner is believed to have been the father of her two daughters Evelina Dupuis and Georgiana Thompson.

JMW Turner formed a relationship with Sophia Caroline Booth after her second husband died, and he lived for about 18 years as "Mr Booth" in her house in Chelsea.

JMW Turner was a habitual user of snuff; in 1838, Louis Philippe I, King of the French presented a gold snuff box to him.

JMW Turner formed a short but intense friendship with the artist Edward Thomas Daniell.

JMW Turner had previously refused to sit for the artist, and it was difficult to get his agreement to be portrayed.

JMW Turner died of cholera at the home of Sophia Caroline Booth, in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, on 19 December 1851.

JMW Turner is buried in St Paul's Cathedral, where he lies near the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds.

JMW Turner was recognised as an artistic genius; the English art critic John Ruskin described him as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature".

JMW Turner's work drew criticism from contemporaries, in particular from Sir George Beaumont, a landscape painter and fellow member of the Royal Academy, who described his paintings as "blots".

JMW Turner's imagination was sparked by shipwrecks, fires, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog.

JMW Turner was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn after the Wreck and The Slave Ship .

JMW Turner's plates were meant to be widely disseminated, and categorised the genre into six types: Marine, Mountainous, Pastoral, Historical, Architectural, and Elevated or Epic Pastoral.

JMW Turner's printmaking was a major part of his output, and a museum is devoted to it, the Turner Museum in Sarasota, Florida, founded in 1974 by Douglass Montrose-Graem to house his collection of Turner prints.

JMW Turner is generally regarded as a precursor of abstract painting.

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Together with a number of young artists, JMW Turner was able, in Monro's London house, to copy works of the major topographical draughtsmen of his time and perfect his skills in drawing.

The solemn grandeur of his Alpine views were an early revelation to the young JMW Turner and showed him the true potential of the watercolour medium, conveying mood instead of information.

JMW Turner used formulations like carmine, despite knowing that they were not long-lasting, and against the advice of contemporary experts to use more durable pigments.

Ruskin complained at how quickly his work decayed; JMW Turner was indifferent to posterity and chose materials that looked good when freshly applied.

JMW Turner left a small fortune which he hoped would be used to support what he called "decayed artists".

JMW Turner planned an almshouse at Twickenham with a gallery for some of his works.

JMW Turner's will was contested and in 1856, after a court battle, his first cousins, including Thomas Price Turner, received part of his fortune.

JMW Turner's finished paintings were bequeathed to the British nation, and he intended that a special gallery would be built to house them.

JMW Turner's collection included examples of almost every type of work on paper the artist produced, from early topographical drawings and atmospheric landscape watercolours, to brilliant colour studies, literary vignette illustrations and spectacular exhibition pieces.

In 2005, JMW Turner's The Fighting Temeraire was voted Britain's "greatest painting" in a public poll organised by the BBC.