J.M.W. Turner

1775–1851

A barber's son from Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, entered the Royal Academy Schools at fourteen and was a full Academician at twenty-six. By the end he had turned light itself into the subject of painting, and left nearly three hundred oils and some thirty thousand sketches and watercolours to the nation.

The five works below hang at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven — the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom — and include the painting Constable called the most complete work of genius he ever saw.

Life

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on 23 April 1775 above his father's barber shop at 21 Maiden Lane and baptised at St Paul's, Covent Garden. His father sold the boy's drawings in the shop window. He entered the Royal Academy Schools on 11 December 1789, was elected an Associate in November 1799 and a full Academician in February 1802 — the youngest the Academy had admitted.

He travelled constantly: the north of England, Scotland in 1801 and again in 1831, the Alps, the Rhine, Holland, Italy. The sketchbooks from those tours fed the studio for decades. On varnishing days at the Academy he famously finished paintings on the wall, working wet colour in front of the other Academicians.

His will, drafted in 1829 and amended in 1848, left his finished pictures to the nation on condition they hung together. After a long contest the 1856 decree gave the nation everything — the Turner Bequest, most of it now at Tate Britain. He died on 19 December 1851 at a cottage in Chelsea under an assumed name, and was buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral beside Reynolds.

Works

Dort, or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed

The packet-boat The Swan lies becalmed on the Merwede, her sails slack, while passengers lean over the side to buy provisions from the rowboats that have come out to meet her. Turner sketched the scene passing through Dordrecht in September 1817, and built the picture as an answer to Aelbert Cuyp's The Maas at Dordrecht — the Dutch master's golden calm, remade in English hands.

Walter Fawkes of Farnley Hall bought it in 1818 for 500 guineas, and it stayed with his family until Paul Mellon acquired it in 1966. Constable, who was not generous about rivals, called it "the most complete work of genius I ever saw."

Staffa, Fingal's Cave

Turner reached Staffa by steamer in 1831, gathering material to illustrate Walter Scott's Lord of the Isles. On the way back a storm got up. He wrote afterwards that "the sun getting towards the horizon, burst through the raincloud, angry" — and that is the picture: the basalt island, the squall, the low sun, and the small red glow of the steamer's furnace against the dark.

In 1845 it was sold to James Lenox of New York, the first Turner to enter an American collection. Lenox's first reaction, on unpacking it, was that it was indistinct. Turner's reply, relayed through the dealer, was that indistinctness was his forte.

Wreckers — Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore

A sailing ship founders off Dunstanburgh Castle while a steamship labours out to help. On the beach the wreckers are already waiting with ropes and nets — not rescuers, but the people who lived off what the sea threw up. Turner puts the old world and the new in one frame: sail, steam, and the coast that broke both.

The incident may be one he saw himself, returning south from Scotland in 1831. It was shown at the Royal Academy in 1834.

Tummel Bridge, Perthshire

A small panel from Turner's first Scottish tour, painted in the year he was made a full Academician. The stone bridge over the Tummel is the kind of subject he drew by the dozen in the Highlands and rarely bothered to finish in oil; this one he did. For many years it was catalogued under the wrong name, as a bridge in Fife.

A Ship Approaching Margate Harbour in a Stormy Sea

A ship drives into Margate harbour through heavy sea, the whole sheet a few strokes of grey and ochre. The white of the breaking water is not paint: Turner scraped it out of the paper with a blade, lifting highlights the way an engraver cuts them. Margate was his retreat in these years; he lodged there with Sophia Booth, and the sea off the Kent coast is in half his late work. The sheet was once catalogued as Yarmouth Sands.