J. M. W. Turner(1775–1851)

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on the twenty-third of April 1775 at 21 Maiden Lane in Covent Garden, London, son of William Turner, a barber and wig-maker who kept the shop on the ground floor of the same house, and Mary Marshall of Brentford. He was raised above the shop in the heart of theatrical Covent Garden, schooled at Brentford and Margate, and at thirteen entered the studio of the architectural draughtsman Thomas Malton the Younger, where he learned the topographical-watercolour idiom of the late eighteenth century. He was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools on the eleventh of December 1789 at fourteen, his entry painting accepted by the President himself, Sir Joshua Reynolds. He exhibited his first watercolour at the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1790 in his fifteenth year, a view of the Archbishop's Palace at Lambeth, and exhibited at every Royal Academy summer exhibition for the next fifty-nine years to the year before his death.

He was elected Associate of the Royal Academy in 1799 in his twenty-fourth year, the youngest age at which the Academy had elected an Associate to that date, and full Royal Academician in 1802 in his twenty-seventh year. He travelled across the British Isles through the 1790s on the topographical tours that produced the great series of watercolours and engravings (Picturesque Views in England and Wales, 1827 to 1838) on which his early reputation rested, and from 1802 made the long European tours, repeatedly to Switzerland, Italy and the Rhine and Mosel valleys, that opened the second great phase of his work. The Snowstorm: Hannibal Crossing the Alps of 1812, exhibited at the Royal Academy that year with verses of his own composition appended to the catalogue (the verses became the standard Turner exhibition catalogue device for the next thirty years), is the foundational large-scale Turner of the heroic landscape manner.

Through the 1820s and 1830s he developed the late style on which his world reputation rests: the dissolution of the topographical subject into pure light, atmosphere and weather; the colour-relationship studies of the 1820s notebooks; the Petworth interiors of the 1820s; the Venice paintings of 1819, 1833 and 1840 to 1846 (Approach to Venice, Going to the Ball, San Benedetto Looking Towards Fusina); the Steam-and-Speed group of the 1830s and 1840s, the works that put the new steam-driven world of the early Victorian period into the new visual register he had built for it. The Fighting Temeraire of 1839, the painting voted in the 2005 BBC Today programme public poll the greatest painting in Britain, was completed at his Queen Anne Street studio in October 1838 and exhibited at the Royal Academy of 1839 with two of Turner's catalogue lines: The flag which braved the battle and the breeze, no longer owns her. Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway of 1844, the late thunderstorm-and-locomotive painting now at the National Gallery, completed the steam-modern register.

He was appointed Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy in 1807 in his thirty-second year, held the post until 1837, and through the long professorship gave the lectures and the perspective demonstrations that shaped the technique of two generations of British landscape painters, John Ruskin among the audience. His third volume of Modern Painters (1843) was written by Ruskin in explicit defence of Turner's late manner; the second of the four volumes (1846) developed Ruskin's theory of the imagination from the example of the Turner late watercolours; the long Ruskin defence carried the critical reputation of the late Turner through the second half of the nineteenth century.

He died on the nineteenth of December 1851 at his second house at 119 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, in his seventy-seventh year. He bequeathed his entire remaining studio (some three hundred oil paintings and over thirty thousand works on paper) to the British nation; the Turner Bequest, the largest single artist's bequest in the history of the British state, was accepted by the National Gallery in 1856 and is housed today in the Clore Gallery extension of Tate Britain on Millbank, designed by James Stirling and opened in 1987 as the largest single-artist permanent display in the United Kingdom. The Fighting Temeraire is on permanent display in Room 34 of the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. The Turner Prize, the United Kingdom's leading contemporary art award, has been awarded annually under his name by the Tate since 1984. The Turner name in modern world art carries the weight of the Covent Garden barber's son who put the light, the weather and the working sea of the British Isles into the painting of the world.