John Mallord William Turner was one of the finest landscape artists was, his work was exhibited when he was still a teenager. His entire life was devoted to his art. Unlike many artists of his era, he was successful throughout his career.
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in England. His father was a barber, his mother died when he was very young. The boy received little schooling. His father taught him how to read, but this was the extent of his education except for the study of art. By the age of 13 he was making drawings at home and exhibiting them in his father's shop window for sale.
Turner was 15 years old when he received a rare honor, one of his oil paintings was exhibited at the Royal Academy. By the time he was 18 he had his own art studio. Before he was 20, print sellers were eagerly buying his drawings for reproduction. He quickly achieved a fine reputation and was elected an associate of the Royal Academy. In 1802, when he was only 27, Turner became a full member. He then began traveling widely in Europe. Venice was the inspiration of some of Turner's finest work. Wherever he visited, he studied the effects of sea and sky in every kind of weather. His early training had been as a topographic draftsman. With the years, he developed a painting technique all his own. Instead of merely recording factually what he saw, Turner translated scenes into a light-filled expression of his own romantic feelings. Subjects that lent themselves to dramatic effect particularly fascinated Turner. Like Caspar David Friedrich, he loved Gothic cathedrals and he also painted numerous watercolors of them early in his career. Traveling through mountains, he recorded the chasms and waterfalls that were both beautiful and dangerous. He had a lifelong passion for the sea and for rivers. It is not surprising that his favorite foreign city was Venice, the ultimate fusion of water and civilization, where he made countless sketches on his visits in 1819 and again in 1828. During the 1830s and 1840s Turner developed his mature vision, in which the forces of nature and history were given grandiose expression in his seascape and landscape oil paintings.
As he grew older and despite his success, he was a recluse, secretive, short (in both stature and speech), and uninterested in society. Rumpled in dress, Turner became an eccentric. Except for his father, with whom he lived for 30 years, he had no close friends. He allowed no one to watch him while he painted. He gave up attending the meetings of the academy. None of his acquaintances saw him for months at a time. Turner continued to travel but always alone. He still held exhibitions, but he usually refused to sell his paintings. When he was persuaded to sell one, he was dejected for days. His handling of paint by 1844 had become purely personal and intuitive. Scraped, brushed and smeared, its purpose was to create sweeping movements and general atmospheres, to imply, rather than describe, both setting and details. Specific forms occasionally loom out of the organic, pulsing stretches of paint, giving context and reference points to the overall blots of color.
In 1850 he exhibited for the last time. One day Turner disappeared from his house. His housekeeper, searching for many months, found him hiding in a house in Chelsea. He had been ill for a long time. He died the next day. Turner left a large fortune that he hoped would be used to support what he called "decaying artists." His collection of paintings was bequeathed to his country. At his request he was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. Although known for his oil paintings, Turner is regarded also as one of the founders of English watercolor landscape painting.
Some of his most famous oil paintings are Rain, Steam and Speed, The Fighting Temeraire and The Grand Canal, Venice. Joseph Mallord William Turner was precocious, brilliant, and successful. To modern eyes, looking back over the last hundred years, when painters removed all subject except the paint, Turner's work is not only great, but way ahead of its time, inspiring many future world artists.
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Rain, Steam and Speed
| The Fighting Temeraire | The Grand Canal, Venice | | |
