John Ruskin, JMW Turner and unpleasant sexual thoughts

John Ruskin (1819–1900) 's life was always going to be difficult with an extremely devout Calvinist mother. The young man grew up to be intellectually skilled but socially unskilled. At least as far as potential marriage partners  went. After getting his degree at Oxford, he began his career as an art critic, writer, full time thinker and part time artist. 

Ruskin soon began collecting pictures by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851). After graduation in 1842, Ruskin busied himself writing an admiring book about Turner, whose work had been unkindly reviewed by the art critics. The book was called Modern Painters, published in five volumes 1843-60. He then followed this work up withThe Seven Lamps of Architecture 1849 and The Stones of Venice published in three volumes 1851-53. Ruskin was clearly a very productive and very talented writer.

Effie Ruskin, modelling in The Order of Release by Millais, 1853, Tate.

In 1848 Ruskin married the gorgeous, young, energetic Effie Gray (1828-97), a marriage that was annulled after six years because he could not or would not tolerate her sexuality. The evidence is readily available. In a letter to her parents, a sad Effie claimed her husband was repulsed by her. "He alleged various reasons, hatred to children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year he told me his true reason... that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening." 

Ruskin confirmed this in his statement to his lawyer during the annulment proceedings. "It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it."

Fortunately for Effie, she did not have to remain a virgin for the rest of her life. After the annulment of her marriage to Ruskin, she agreed to be the model for John Everett Millais' painting The Order of Release 1853. In 1855, she married Millais and they had eight delightful children.

John Ruskin in Venice, 1856

Now back to JMW Turner. The rather poorly dressed, badly spoken artist never married, but he did have one very satisfying relationship in the 1730s that lasted until his death in 1851. Martin Gayford wrote that Turner lived in domestic bliss in Margate with his landlady, a buxom and illiterate young widow called Sophia Booth. It seemed to have been the best period he ever spent with a woman, and since income was no longer a problem, the two of them spent more of the time in bed than out of it. Lucky Turner!

Since Turner was not playing out the role of famous artist in Margate and then in Chelsea, he did not use his real name locally. He called himself Admiral Booth while visiting his favourite watering holes. 

Turner died at the age of 76 in 1851, leaving behind some 300 paintings and 19,000 drawings that Ruskin catalogued. But Ruskin did more than cataloguing. Ruskin claimed that in 1858 he burned bundles of paintings and drawings done by Turner during the Sophia Caroline Booth era, to protect Turner's posthumous reputation. Turner's reputation would have been at risk, presumably, because either Turner and Booth were living in sin, or because the paintings and drawings had sexualised content. In either case, Ruskin had been vigorously defending Turner for 10 years and felt betrayed by the older man.

Ruskin's friend Ralph Nicholson Wornum (1812-77), who was Keeper of the National Gallery from 1855 until his death, might or might not have known about the destruction of Turner's works.

Turner, Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore in Margate, c1840, Tate.

Were the censored paintings and drawings erotic? Did they show Sophia Booth lounging around in dishabille? Now I don’t care if Ruskin liked sex with women, sex with men, sex with prostitutes or no sex ever in his entire life. He was an adult who was perfectly capable of making his own decisions, even socially inept ones. But he made decisions that affected Turner’s legacy. And even if the paintings and drawings that he destroyed were awful, Ruskin still didn’t have the right to deny art historians, collectors, galleries and art lovers access to Turner’s total ouevre. 

Readers might like to read William James’ book The Order of Release - The Story of John Ruskin, Effie Gray and John Everett Millais, published by John Murray in 1946. 

Robert Hewison's book Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, was published by the Tate in 2000. It accompanied their exhibition of the same name.

J.M.W.TURNER

J.M.W.Turner

Rain, Steam, and Speed The Great Western Railway

About the rain there can be no doubt; it envelops the whole land in a light veil of mist; it strikes like beams across the bridge. Butit is only summer rain, not sufficient to stop the ploughman in he field over the water a good strong shower. however, which must somewhat disconcert the waders or bathers on the left. The steam also is obvious. visibly in the puffs that come from the engine, and. mentally, from the fact of there being an engine at all. And the speed yes, that is evident too. from the distance between the puffs of steam, and the terror of the poor hare. who will surely be overtaken and crushed in an instant. Some persons see a deeper meaning in this picture, something analogous to that of theTémérairs the old order changing, the easy-going past giving way to the quick-living future; and there is something in the contrast between the plough and the stean­engine the ugly form of the railway bridge and train, and the beauty and peace of the old bridge and the landscape, which shows that some such thoughts were not absent from the painter’s mind. But this is one of the pictures which is best without a title. for no title can comprehend all it may be intended to mean. It. suggestiveness is infinite, and, for those who do not care about seeking out hidden meanings, its marvellous ness is sufficient of itself Any one can go and stand before it. and the longer they so stand the more wonderful will appear the power which could suggest much by touches, which seem at first to be as meaningless are innumerable and slight.
The National Gallery of London

The Italian Dreams of an English Master TWITTER LINKEDIN SIGN IN TO E-MAIL OR SAVE THIS PRINT REPRINTS SHARE

FERRARA, Italy — J. M. W. Turner did not see Italy until 1802, the same year he was elected to the Royal Academy at 27, then the youngest member ever.

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National Gallery of Art, Washington

Turner’s “Arrival at Venice,” 1844: Mediterranean light and strong, contrasting colors had dramatic consequences for his palette.

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Paintings by J. M. W. Turner (iht.com)

But the idea of Italy had already become an essential element in the productions of this precociously accomplished painter and draftsman while he was in his teens. His later visits to the peninsula had a radical effect on his mature work.

The lifelong impact of the Italian experience on this English artist is the subject of “Turner and Italy,” an exhibition organized by James Hamilton and featuring nearly 90 paintings and drawings. The show travels to the National Gallery in Edinburgh and the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest after its run here.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) began to imbibe Italy in his youth through English buildings influenced by Italian architecture. He grew up near Inigo Jones’s Covent Garden Piazza, and his first apprenticeships were with an architect and an architectural draftsman. Also making an impression were old-master Italian paintings, the landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Italian views by British painters, notably Richard Wilson and John Robert Cozens. All three of these artists are represented in the exhibition.

Although he was the son of a barber, Turner found patrons who would have been willing to commission him to travel to Italy to execute works for them and extend his artistic education, but the Napoleonic wars meant the continent was closed to him.

A brief pause in this long conflict, after the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, precipitated a rush of English visitors to France. Artists seized the chance to visit Paris and the Louvre, then stuffed with looted masterpieces from all over Europe, advertised over the museum’s cornice as “Les Fruits de Nos Victoires” (“The Fruits of Our Victories”).

Turner, with his patrons’ assistance, traveled to Paris and surveyed the Louvre, but he was eager to press on to Italy. On the way he discovered the Alps, the most enduring bonus of his trip. The profound effect that these mountains had on him is illustrated here by drawings and watercolors, including “St. Gotthard Pass From the Middle of the Devil’s Bridge.” The work depicts a narrow mule path snaking beneath overhanging rocks on the sheer cliff face, streaked with frozen cascades above and the dizzying chasm below, half-concealed by icy mists.

On this trip Turner made it only as far as Aosta on the southern side of the Alps, where he saw his first Roman remains on Italian soil.

Brief though this taste of Italy was, it stimulated Turner to produce further colorful scenes of cities that he was yet to visit himself, among them Rome and Naples. The renewed hostilities impeded his return to the continent for many years.

Claude Lorrain, that longtime Italian resident and Turner hero, was a primary influence on Turner’s “Liber Studiorum.” Claude had compiled a catalog of drawings of his own paintings, the “Liber Veritatis.” In 1806 Turner began a similar project, intended for publication, of etchings of his own paintings. Italian landscapes, often with architectural features, figured prominently in this collection.

But Turner went further, transforming rural Thames-side views to the west of London into Claudian Italianate pastoral scenes. “Isleworth,” a print from the “Liber Studiorum” on view in the show, depicts the still picturesque riverside village where Turner lived after his return to England. The medieval church tower, cottages and mill appear mistily in the background, but in sharp focus in the foreground Turner has conjured a circular Roman temple on the tree-lined riverbank, imbuing the scene with a distinctly Claudian atmosphere.

“Isleworth” is dated Jan. 1, 1819. In the summer of that year Turner again set out for Italy.

He had prepared for years for this opportunity: he immersed himself in classical literature, works by the Roman poets and historians, and Alexander Pope’s translations of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey”; studied travel literature, poetic and prosaic; and made a notebook (on show here) of thumbnail sketches, a dozen to a page, of the places he intended to seek out and record for himself.

Turner traversed the Alps again and took a zigzag route down the peninsula, making his first visit to Venice, passing through Bologna, Rimini and Ancona, crossing the Apennines and going through Umbria on the way to Rome and Naples.

Vesuvius erupted shortly after he returned to Rome, and he started a watercolor sketch (the unfinished work was lent by the Tate) of the volcano seen from across the bay, emitting twin plumes of decorative smoke, drifting lazily inland against a tranquil but subtly darkening sky.

Exposure to the full force of Mediterranean light and the strong, contrasting colors of Italy’s land- and seascapes had dramatic consequences for Turner’s palette; he adopted a new range of vibrant yellows, blues and reds. Nor were these applied only to his Italian paintings, which he worked up from hundreds of often minutely detailed drawings and sketches into oils and watercolors when he returned home. The palette could also be seen in new works depicting his native land.

Over the next decade, as the exhibition shows, sooty Edinburgh became a Caledonian Roman forum basking in the southern sun; Minehead in Somerset, a northern Bay of Naples. Hythe in Kent was transposed to the Gulf of Salerno, while Virginia Water, a small lake in Surrey to the west of London, took on the glassy, miasmatic air of the Venetian lagoon in midsummer.

This proved too much for some British critics, who complained that Turner’s painting was suffering from some kind of “yellow fever.” In 1828 he returned to Rome for an extended sojourn to try out the life of a resident artist. He held an exhibition of his work at a palazzo on the Quirinal Hill. Instead of wood, he used ship’s ropes painted with yellow ochre to frame the pictures. The antiquary David Laing wrote that “the people here cannot understand his style at all.”

JMW TURNER

J.M.W TURNER RETROSPECTIVE AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NYC

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, "Sunrise with Sea Monsters c. 1845;" Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 122 cm; Tate Gallery, London

Retrospectives of painters can be unpredictable-sometimes you come away with a very different impression of a painter than the one you had initially had. Since a renowned artist is typically associated with a few signature masterpieces, seeing a survey of everything else that they did leading up their career arc and everything afterward can lead to changing perceptions. One one hand, it can reveal a dynamic side. Take the MoMA retrospective of George Seurat’s drawings last year. For OMNP, this show added a new dimension to his work that extended beyond the calculated pointillism of “A Sunday on la Grand Jatte,” displaying a variety of techniques that ranged from the softly caressed portrait to the frenzied landscape sketch. OMNP was taken by the range of moods evoked by this variety in style, and particularly by the darker side to Seurat and his melancholic vision of modernity.

On the other hand, these shows can make a painter out to be a lot more monotonous. While the sheer talent of Joseph William Mallord Turner keeps the recent retrospective of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from completely falling into this categorization, OMNP came away from this show feeling ambivalent.To be sure, Turner was a great artist-an artistic pioneer whose focus on light prefigured the Impressionists, and whose feel for evocative atmospheres and the drama of the natural elements was unsurpassed. While such qualities made him unique, however, one leaves this exhibition feeling that they also made him one-dimensional.

As Roberta Smith alluded to earlier this month , viewing one or two Turner paintings is a lot different than 150 of them at once. We are used to seeing his paintings sticking out by themselves in a museum’s collection. But when they are bunched together, it causes his work to feel formulaic. The landscapes may change, but the feeling behind each is the same. Turner’s scenes always have a surreal quality to them, where brooding clouds “(The Tenth Plague of Egypt”) and crashing waves (“Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen” ) are dominating characters that are awe inspiring in relation to the tiny figures of men before them. These pictures eschew Turner’s Romantic sensibilities. Like many other of his fellow painters and writers in Britain at the time, Turner cherished the bucolic qualities of the English landscape,which stood to be tarnished in the approaching age of Industrialism. Turning towards the writings of Edmund Burke, Turner sought out the sublime power of nature and its ability to evoke, as the Met quotes, the “strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

While such artistic values may succeed in depicting compelling landscapes, they do not translate as well in other types of scenes. Take Turner’s attempt at history painting, with works like “The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory.” The figures in this painting lack any sort of individuality or human emotion. Instead of a dramatic myth, Turner gives us a sensory filled reenactment of the battle-depicting the foggy haze of sea mist and gunfire and the tangled confusion of ships battling at such close range. This may be a realistic recreation, but for such an important moment in British history, its specificity detracts from its legend. The same could be said of “The Field of Waterloo.” Turner eerily creates the fire and brimstone that rages on in the distance, but pays little attention to the pathos of the suffering figures in the foreground.

Notwithstanding, in some instances, Turner’s lack of countenance towards living forms makes them all the more affable. Who could not be charmed by the silhouette of the barking dog in “Dawn after the Wreck” or the tiny fleck of gray resembling a sprinting rabbit in “Rain, Steam, and Speed,”? Both these paintings, however, are not included in the show. Where was “The Slave Ship,” and “The Fighting Temeraire,” by the way? The retrospective felt incomplete without them-perhaps they are just too valuable to leave their respective homes.

Turner’s paintings, while both beautiful, and ahead of their time, are still considered to be the black sheep of their time. Their unorthodox nature may have overshadowed his goal of bringing landscape painting to a level of esteem on par with the grand history painting of his idol, Nicholas Poussin. Yet this was a man who should be celebrated for not only finding a unique vision of the world, but relentlessly exploring new ways to depict it. A final painting from the show, “Sunrise with Sea Monsters” shows Turner, in the throes of his career, almost delving into full out abstraction. The blurb of some amphibious form emerging from the oceans surface is barely made out in a swirl of pink, olive, maroon, and ivory white.

JMW TURNER

A pug-ugly, money-grabbing philanderer with a chip on his shoulder, he was also Britain's greatest ever painter. As a major new exhibition of his masterpieces opens, the unvarnished truth about JMW Turner.

Wearing a grubby frock coat spattered with paint and a battered stovepipe hat perched on his head, the artist, a short and portly pug-faced gentleman going on 60, stepped up on to a bench and confronted the largely blank canvas hanging in a frame on the exhibition room wall. 

He picked up his box of colours and a palette knife. Though it was very early on a cold February morning in 1835, a small crowd had already gathered and a murmur of expectation ran round it. 

Some couldn't help sniggering at the ungainly figure of this grumpy and rather preposterous-looking little man. But William Turner was about to demonstrate an artistry that was simply out of this world.

This was Varnishing Day, the period before an exhibition officially opened when artists traditionally came in to put the finishing touches to their paintings and seal them with varnish. 

Weeks earlier, Turner had submitted a work that was not so much unfinished as hardly even started, just a few meaningless daubs, no form, no composition, no discernible subject  -  yet. 

Now he set to work, a spotted neckerchief at his throat, his umbrella  -  which concealed a two-foot swordstick blade for protection on his many travels at home and abroad in search of landscapes to paint  -  at his feet. 

He squeezed the lumps of colour through his fingers and smeared them on to the canvas, tearing, scratching and moulding the blues, reds and yellows into a chaotic mass of colour with his knife, scarcely bothering with a brush. 

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By 25 the painter had half-a-dozen rich aristocratic patrons and would never want for work or money again. Above, his favourite painting The Fighting Temeraire

He worked away without a break, his eyes leaving the canvas only for an instant when he stooped to pick up another vial of colour. Not once did he even step back to view his own progress, so assured was his touch. He was like a man possessed, utterly absorbed in his vision and his creation. When, after several hours, he finished, he simply packed up his paints and sidled away, without a word or a backward glance. 

The amazed onlookers were open-mouthed that the artist did not feel the need to look at his own work. This was a true master. 'He knows it is done, and he is off,' said one. Turner was living up to his legendary status as the most daring British artist of his day. 

And the most brilliant. The canvas on the wall now shone with a stunning and dramatic picture of the Houses of Parliament at Westminster, engulfed in flames. This had actually happened six months earlier when the entire building burned to the ground, and Turner was one of many horrified Londoners who witnessed it. He had hired a boat and sailed up and down the Thames all night to watch. 

He committed his mother to the Bedlam mental asylum and never once visited her

Now he had reproduced the dramatic, fiery image on canvas, the smoke and flames roaring off the canvas into the night sky. He painted it utterly from memory and in a single sitting. That is how extraordinary this pushy, precocious Cockney, who was the son of a barber and grew up among the back streets and bordellos of Covent Garden, really was. 

That genius is celebrated in an important new exhibition that opened this week at the Tate Britain gallery in London. It displays his works alongside those by old masters such as Rembrandt, Titian, Poussin, and Canaletto, who inspired him and shows how in many ways (though not always) he surpassed them. It seals his reputation as this country's greatest artist, past or present. 

The man himself, however, was a supreme oddity. He was arrogant and abrasive, and had a turbulence of mind that was reflected in the turbulent skies and seas that marked his masterpieces and set him apart from his contemporaries. He committed his mother to the Bedlam mental asylum and never once visited her, but his own uncontrolled temper had touches of her 'ungovernable' madness. 

The landscape artist John Constable dismissed Turner as 'uncouth'

Though his difficult genius attracted loyal friends and supporters, it also made him enemies. He was a hard man to love. He was money-grasping and mean. He was sly and secretive, sexually active but resolutely single. With a large, fleshy nose and a pointy chin, he was no oil painting to look at, but he had a penchant for the company of pretty young girls and the beds of widows. 

The landscape artist John Constable  -  his exact contemporary and bitter rival  -  dismissed Turner as 'uncouth', a word that in the parlance of Georgian England meant strange and unusual. But its modern meaning was also often applied to the upstart. In an era of sharp social distinctions, his lowly, back-street origins and lack of formal education tended to attract scorn from the aloof. He had 'the manners of a groom, with no respect,' said one snobbish colleague. 

He was mocked for his Cockney accent and an inability to express himself clearly, whether in the public lectures he was called on to give as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy or in conversation. Except with close friends, he would stutter and stumble or, more often than not, stay silent and sullen. 

Grumpy and unfathomable was how even his friends saw him. His enemies were repelled by his arrogant (if deserved) belief in his own supreme ability and his unconcealed disdain for lesser talents. 

His tight-fisted approach to money was the stuff of gossip and distaste. Rich patrons objected to paying handsomely for a commissioned picture and then being asked to stump up an extra 20 guineas for the frame on top of the agreed 250 guineas. 

His haggling appalled the Scottish writer, Sir Walter Scott, author of Rob Roy and Ivanhoe, who commissioned him to do engravings of Edinburgh scenery for a history he was compiling. 

Scott complained to a friend: 'Turner's palm is as itchy as his fingers are ingenious. He will do nothing without cash, and anything for it. He is the only man of genius I ever knew who is sordid in these matters.' 

But Scott, son of a solicitor, was born into material comfort. Turner, on the other hand, had to live off his talent from a precociously early age. If he was chippy about money, it was because he had always had to work for it. 

He was an earner from the age of 12, when he painted skies that were sold off a stall in Soho as background drawing aids for daughters of the gentry. Still a boy, he flogged pictures of river scenes to his father's customers as they waited to be shaved and at 14 had a job in an architect's office colouring in the drawings. At 16 he was painting scenery for an opera house for four guineas a week. At 19 he was giving art lessons at five shillings a time. 

He himself loved all his paintings. They were, he said, his 'children'  -  ignoring the real ones he actually had

By 25 he had half-a-dozen rich aristocratic patrons and would never want for work or money again, but he never lost the underlying suspicion that someone might be diddling him. 

He worked fantastically hard  -  constantly travelling to find new subjects, filling his sketch books, obsessively churning out the pieces, often with several pictures on the go at the same time. He kept his paints on a specially-made revolving table to speed up his output. 

He expected his just deserts for his effort and talent. He would rather not sell a painting than let it go to a rich, titled punter for less than he thought it was worth. 

Constable, by contrast, had an allowance from his wealthy corn merchant father and didn't sell a painting worth talking about until he was 43. No wonder Turner hated him. 

It was the same in their private lives. The handsome, fresh-faced Constable married a woman he adored and had seven children with her. Turner's love life, however, was mysterious and even devious. 

He refused point-blank ever to marry. 

'I hate married men,' he once said, possibly thinking of the uxorious Constable.

'They never make any sacrifice to the arts but are always thinking of their duty to their wives and their families, or some rubbish of that sort.' 

Sex, though, was a different matter. The lusty Turner sought it, indulged in it and drew it in considerable detail, though this is an aspect of the great man's work that is seldom dwelt on. He made numerous erotic sketches and paintings. Some are plainly pornographic. His notebooks show that even at the age of 70, he was drawing close-ups of private parts and copulation. 

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Turner's watercolour The Blue Rigi: Lake of Lucerne, Sunrise, painted in 1842

In his 30s, he penned a semi-dirty ditty about his 'passport to bliss' with a girl named Molly. She was possibly a prostitute he knew, but no one can be sure. What is sure is that Turner had a secret lover named Sarah Danby, with whom he had illegitimate daughters, Evelina and Georgiana. Their existence only came to light after his death when modest bequests to them appeared in his will. 

Sarah was ten years older than him and married to a friend of his, a composer and singer, when he first knew her. When her husband died, the 25-year-old Turner took his place in her bed. With his growing wealth, he was able to set her up in a home of her own and their on-off relationship lasted 15 years. There were times early on when they may have actually lived together but precisely where and for how long is unclear. 

He preferred, anyway, to retreat to the house, studio and gallery he had acquired for himself in the posh Harley Street district of London. There, he hired a 23-year-old unmarried relation of Sarah, named Hannah Danby, who cooked and kept the house for him for the next 40 years until his death. Her presence  -  plus his father, who lived with him and worked for him too  -  enabled the artist to come and go as he pleased, answering to no one. 

He had his flirtations  -  he was drawn to the twenty-something daughters of friends and spent pleasant and affectionate time in their company. Some of the friendships became quite intense. When Turner chose to turn on the charm, he was riveting. 

For Turner, what mattered about him was on his canvases. In a lesson that would not be lost on many modern-day celebrities, he made sure his private life was resolutely his own business

In later life, there was Sophia Booth, whose boarding house in Margate he frequented. The resort on the Kent coast had become a popular destination for Londoners, easily reached by steamer down the Thames. Turner would hang over the stern of the boat, drinking in the sight of the churning foam. 

He chose her house to stay in because the light  -  his obsession  -  was exceptional from its seafront position. When her husband died, Turner took her as his companion, and they were a fixture for the rest of his life. This was the closest he ever got to marriage or domesticity. 

He brought her to London, to a small riverside cottage in Chelsea. Here and in Margate they were seen out together, arm in arm, a strange couple, the shabby, diminutive, elderly gentleman and his tall, imposing and well turned-out younger 'wife'. 

Neighbours and shopkeepers called him 'Mr Booth'. With a touch of social vanity and a nod to the seascapes he loved, he liked to be known as 'the Admiral'. Nobody guessed who he really was. 

Away from her, as he frequently was, he kept up appearances as the famous artist. He made sure the two worlds never collided. On returning to Chelsea from the Royal Academy or his club in Pall Mall, he would put his friends off the scent by refusing to give his destination to the cabman in front of anyone. 

For Turner, what mattered about him was on his canvases. In a lesson that would not be lost on many modern-day celebrities, he made sure his private life was resolutely his own business. But the artistic and the private did touch on each other, sometimes crucially. It was on a journey back from Margate that, as the steamer passed Rotherhithe, Turner is said to have caught sight of the hulk of an old warship, tied up at a breaker's yard. 

It was HMS Temeraire, which 33 years earlier had bravely gone to the rescue of Nelson's flagship, the Victory, at the Battle of Trafalgar, an event that had impressed itself on the mind of the fiercely patriotic artist. Here was his inspiration for the painting that will always be associated with his name  -  The Fighting Temeraire. 

Against a dramatic sky, a setting sun and a looking-glass sea, it showed her as a ghost-like presence being towed to her berth for breaking up. It combines beauty with dignity and nostalgia. Its balance is exquisite, its echoes eternal. 

Turner had fierce critics who denounced his increasingly impressionistic style of painting as frenzied and formless. 

'Soapsuds and whitewash' was one unkind description of his work. There was also much laughter at a pantomime skit in which a baker's boy dropped a tray of yellow and red jam tarts, put a frame round the mess on the floor and sold it off as a Turner for £1,000. 

Unveiled to the world at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1839, Temeraire silenced all the sneers. 

He himself loved all his paintings. They were, he said, his 'children'  -  ignoring the real ones he actually had but chose not to see. Temeraire, though, was his favourite. He called it My Darling. 

Whether Sophia Booth was also his darling or just a useful convenience in his old age, we will never know. He never painted her or wrote about her. But she was the one holding his hand as, aged 76, he died in his bed in their Chelsea cottage in 1851. 

Fittingly, though it was a December day, the clouds parted and a brilliant sun, the one that so often illuminated his masterpieces to dazzling effect, shone down on him. 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1216132/Sex-feuds-money-What-Britains-greatest-painter-JMW-Turner-REALLY-prized.html#ixzz2NJn6dpjc
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J.M.W. TURNER

Joseph Mallord William "J. M. W." Turner, RA (23 April 1775 – 19 December 1851) was a British Romantic landscape painter,water-colourist, and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevatedlandscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting.^[1] Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolour landscape painting. He is commonly known as "the painter of light"^[2] and his work is regarded as a Romantic preface to Impressionism.

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[edit]Biography

[edit]Early life

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on or around 23 April 1775^[a] in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, England.^[3] His father, William Turner (1745-21 September 1829), was a barber and wig maker,^[4] His mother, Mary Marshall, came from a family of butchers.^[5] A younger sister, Mary Ann, was born in September 1778 but died aged four in August 1783.^[6]

Drawing of St John's Church, Margate by Turner from around 1786, when he would have been 11 or 12 years old. The ambitious but unsure drawing shows an early struggle with perspective, which can be contrasted with his later work

A View of the Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth – this watercolour was Turner's first to be accepted for the Royal Academy's annual exhibition in April 1790, the month he turned fifteen. The image is a technical presentation of Turner's strong grasp of the elements of perspective with several buildings at sharp angles to each other, demonstrating Turner's thorough mastery of Thomas Malton's topographical style.^[7]

Fishermen at Sea exhibited in 1796 was the first oil painting exhibited by Turner at the Royal Academy

Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino

In 1785, as a result of a "fit of illness" in the family^[b][5] the young Turner was sent to stay with his maternal uncle, Joseph Mallord William Marshall, in Brentford, then a small town on the banks of the River Thames west of London. From this period, the earliest known artistic exercise by Turner is found, a series of simple colourings of engraved plates from Henry Boswell's Picturesque View of the Antiquities of England and Wales.^[8] Around 1786, Turner was sent to Margate on the north-east Kent coast. Here he produced a series of drawings of the town and surrounding area foreshadowing his later work. Turner returned to Margate many times in later life.^[9]By this time, Turner's drawings were being exhibited in his father's shop window and sold for a few shillings.^[5] His father boasted to the artist Thomas Stothard that: "My son, sir, is going to be a painter".^[10] In 1789 Turner again stayed with his uncle, who had retired to Sunningwell in Oxford. A whole sketchbook of work from this time in Oxford survives, as well as a watercolour of Oxford. The use of pencil sketches on location as a basis for later finished paintings formed the basis of Turner's essential working style for his whole career.^[8]

Many early sketches by Turner were architectural studies and/or exercises in perspective and it is known that as a young man he worked for several architects including Thomas Hardwick (junior), James Wyatt and Bonomi the Elder.^[11] By the end of 1789 he had also begun to study under the topographical draughtsman Thomas Malton, whom Turner would later call "My real master".^[12] He entered the Royal Academy of Art schools in 1789, when he was 14 years old,^[13] and was accepted into the academy a year later. Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy, chaired the panel that admitted him. At first Turner showed a keen interest in architecture but was advised to continue painting by the architect Thomas Hardwick. His first watercolour painting A View of the Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth was accepted for the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1790 when Turner was 15.

As a probationer in the academy, he was taught drawing from plaster casts of antique sculptures and his name appears in the registry of the academy over a hundred times from July 1790 to October 1793.^[14] In June 1792 he was admitted to the life class to learn to draw the human body from nude models.^[15] Turner exhibited watercolours each year at the academy – travelling in the summer and painting in the winter. He travelled widely throughout Britain, particularly to Wales, and produced a wide range of sketches for working up into studies and watercolours. These particularly focused on architectural work, which utilised his skills as a draughtsman.^[14] In 1793, he showed a watercolour titled The Rising Squall – Hot Wells from St Vincent's Rock Bristol (now lost) that foreshadowed his later climatic effects.^[7] Cunningham in his obituary of Turner wrote that it was: "recognised by the wiser few as a nobel attempt at lift in landscape art out of the tame insipidities...[and] evinced for the fist time that mastery of effect for which he is now justly celebrated."^[16]

Turner exhibited his first oil painting at the academy in 1796, Fishermen at Sea. A nocturnal moonlit scene off the Needles, Isle of Wight. The image of boats in peril contrasts the cold light of the moon with the firelight glow of the fishermen's lantern.^[17] Wilton said that the image: "Is a summary of all that had been said about the sea by the artists of the eighteenth century."^[18] and shows strong influence by artists such as Horace Vernet, Philip James de Loutherbourg and Willem van de Velde the Younger. The image was praised by contemporary critics and founded Turner's reputation, both as an oil painter and as a painter of maritime scenes.^[19]

[edit]Early career

Turner travelled widely in Europe, starting with France and Switzerland in 1802 and studying in the Louvre in Paris in the same year. He made many visits to Venice. On a visit to Lyme Regis, in Dorset he painted a stormy scene (now in the Cincinnati Art Museum).

Important support for his work came from Walter Ramsden Fawkes, of Farnley Hall, near Otley in Yorkshire, who became a close friend of the artist. Turner first visited Otley in 1797, aged 22, when commissioned to paint watercolours of the area. He was so attracted to Otley and the surrounding area that he returned to it throughout his career. The stormy backdrop of Hannibal Crossing The Alps is reputed to have been inspired by a storm over the Chevin in Otley while he was staying at Farnley Hall.

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. Petworth House still displays a number of paintings.

[edit]Personal life

As Turner grew older, he became more eccentric. He had few close friends except for his father, who lived with him for 30 years and worked as his studio assistant. His father's death in 1829 had a profound effect, and thereafter he was subject to bouts of depression. He never married but had a relationship with an older widow, Sarah Danby. He is believed to have been the father of her two daughters born in 1801 and 1811.^[20]

[edit]Death

Turner died in the house of his mistress Sophia Caroline Booth in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea on 19 December 1851. He is said to have uttered the last words "The sun is God" before expiring.^[21] At his request he was buried in St Paul's Cathedral, where he lies next to Sir Joshua Reynolds. His last exhibition at the Royal Academy was in 1850.

Turner's friend, architect Philip Hardwick (1792–1870), son of his tutor, Thomas Hardwick, was in charge of making the funeralarrangements and wrote to those who knew Turner to tell them at the time of his death that, "I must inform you, we have lost him." Other executors were his cousin and chief mourner at the funeral, Henry Harpur IV (benefactor of Westminster – now Chelsea & Westminster – Hospital), Revd. Henry Scott Trimmer, George Jones RA and Charles Turner ARA.

[edit]Art

Joseph Mallord William Turner – Dutch Boats in a Gale (1801)

Willem van de Velde the Younger, Ships on a Stormy Sea (c. 1672)

Turner's painting Dutch Boats in a Gale (the Bridgewater Sea Piece) was painted as a pendant to this painting by Willem van de Velde for the Duke of Bridgewater.

[edit]Style

Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. According to David Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described him as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." (Piper 321)

One of Turner's most successful "house portraits."^[22] The Walters Art Museum.

Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were found in shipwrecks, fires (such as the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner rushed to witness first-hand, and which he transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn after the Wreck(1840) and The Slave Ship (1840).

Turner's major venture into printmaking was the Liber Studiorum (Book of Studies), seventy prints that he worked on from 1806 to 1819. The Liber Studiorum was an expression of his intentions for landscape art. Loosely based on Claude Lorrain's Liber Veritatis (Book of Truth), the plates were meant to be widely disseminated, and categorised the genre into six types: Marine, Mountainous, Pastoral, Historical, Architectural, and Elevated or Epic Pastoral.^[23] His 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.^[24]

Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God–a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena.

Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway painted (1844)

His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape. However, in Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects.^[25]

One story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality, states he had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea.^[26]

In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but exerted an influence on art in France; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.

Chichester Canal's vivid colours may have been influenced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815.

High levels of ash in the atmosphere during 1816 the "Year Without a Summer", led to unusually spectacular sunsets during this period, and were an inspiration for some of Turner's work.

John Ruskin says in his "Notes" on Turner in March 1878, that an early patron, Dr Thomas Monro, the Principal Physician of Bedlam, was a significant influence on Turner's style:

His true master was Dr Monro; to the practical teaching of that first patron and the wise simplicity of method of watercolour study, in which he was disciplined by him and companioned by Giston, the healthy and constant development of the greater power is primarily to be attributed; the greatness of the power itself, it is impossible to over-estimate.

On a trip to Europe, circa 1820, he met the Irish physician Robert James Graves. Graves was travelling in a diligence in the Alps when a man who looked like the mate of a ship got in, sat beside him, and soon took from his pocket a note-book across which his hand from time to time passed with the rapidity of lightning. Graves wondered if the man was insane, he looked, saw that the stranger had been noting the forms of clouds as they passed and that he was no common artist. The two travelled and sketched together for months. Graves tells that Turner would outline a scene, sit doing nothing for two or three days, then suddenly, "perhaps on the third day, he would exclaim 'there it is', and seizing his colours work rapidly till he had noted down the peculiar effect he wished to fix in his memory."

Wreckers Coast of Northumberland, painted ca. 1836. Yale Center for British Art

An engraving of a sketch by Turner depicting Brougham Castle. The sketch, made during a visit to the castle in 1809, provided the starting point for a later watercolour.

Turner's 1813 watercolour Ivy Bridge

The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1839

The shipwreck of the Minotaur, oil on canvas

J.M.W. Turner, Calais Pier

The first American to buy a Turner painting was James Lenox of New York City, a private collector. Lenox wished to own a Turner and in 1845 bought one unseen through an intermediary, his friend C. R. Leslie. From among the paintings Turner had on hand and was willing to sell for £500, Leslie selected and shipped the 1832 atmospheric seascape Staffa, Fingal's Cave.^[27] Worried about the painting's reception by Lenox, who knew Turner's work only through etchings, Leslie wrote to Lenox that the quality of Staffa, "a most poetic picture of a steam boat" would become apparent in time. On receiving the painting Lenox was baffled, and "greatly disappointed" by what he called the painting's "indistinctness". When Leslie was forced to relay this opinion to Turner, Turner said "You should tell Mr Lenox that indistinctness is my forte." Staffa, Fingal's Cave is now owned by the Yale Center for British Art.

[edit]Legacy

Turner left a small fortune which he hoped would be used to support what he called "decayed artists". He planned and designed an almshouse for them at Twickenham with a gallery for some of his works. His will was contested and in 1856, after a court battle, part of his fortune was awarded to his first cousins including Thomas Price Turner.^[28] Another portion went to the Royal Academy of Arts, which occasionally awards students the Turner Medal. His collection of finished paintings was bequeathed to the British nation, and he intended that a special gallery would be built to house them. This did not happen because of a failure to agree a site, and to the parsimony of British governments. Twenty-two years after his death, the British Parliament passed an act allowing his paintings to be lent to museums outside London, and so began the process of scattering the pictures which Turner had wanted to be kept together. In 1910 the main part of the Turner Bequest, which includes unfinished paintings and drawings, was rehoused in the Duveen Turner Wing at the Tate Britain. In 1987 a new wing at the Tate, the Clore Gallery, was opened to house the Turner bequest, though some of the most important paintings remain in the National Gallery in contravention of Turner's condition that they be kept and shown together. Increasingly paintings are lent abroad, ignoring Turner's provision that they be kept "constantly" in Turner's Gallery. After the Turner content was diminished and diluted in the Clore Gallery from c. 2002, in 2010–12 only two of the nine rooms on the main floor were devoted to Turner. The claim that the Tate was fulfilling Turner's wishes was dropped in 1995, when the Charity Commission said that the Turner Bequest had been free of Turner's conditions. This was challenged by Leolin Price QC.

A commemorative stained glass window was added to St. Mary's Church, Battersea between 1976 and 1982.^[29] There are statues representing him at St Paul's Cathedral, Royal Academy of Arts and Victoria & Albert Museum. A portrait drawing by Cornelius Varley with his patent graphic telescope (Sheffield Museums & Galleries) was compared with his death mask (National Portrait Gallery, London) by Kelly Freeman at Dundee University 2009–10 to ascertain whether it really depicts Turner. A memorial plaque on the site of his birthplace at 21 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden was unveiled on 2 June 1999. .^[30]

The Turner Society was founded by Selby Whittingham at London and Manchester in 1975. After the society endorsed the Tate Gallery's Clore Gallery wing (on the lines of the Duveen wing of 1910), as the solution to the controversy of what should be done with the Turner Bequest, Selby Whittingham resigned and founded the Independent Turner Society.

A prestigious annual art award, the Turner Prize, created in 1984, was named in Turner's honour, and twenty years later the Winsor & Newton Turner Watercolour Award was founded.

A major exhibition, "Turner's Britain", with material (including The Fighting Temeraire) on loan from around the globe, was held atBirmingham Museum & Art Gallery from 7 November 2003 to 8 February 2004. In 2005, Turner's The Fighting Temeraire was voted Britain's "greatest painting" in a public poll organised by the BBC.^[31]

Turner's Ovid Banished From Rome, 1838

In October 2005, Professor Harold V. Livermore (1914–2010), its owner for 60 years, gave Sandycombe Lodge, the villa at Twickenham which Turner designed and built for himself, to the Sandycombe Lodge Trust to be preserved as a monument to the artist. In 2006 he also gave some land to the Trust which had been part of Turner's domaine. The organisation The Friends of Turner's House was formed in 2004 to support it.

In April 2006, Christie's New York auctioned Giudecca, La Donna Della Salute and San Giorgio, a view of Venice exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1841, for US$35.8 million, setting a new record for a Turner work. The New York Times stated that according to two sources who had requested anonymity the buyer was casino magnate Stephen Wynn.

In 2006, Turner's Glaucus and Scylla (1840) was returned by Kimbell Art Museum to the heirs of John and Anna Jaffe after a holocaustclaim was made.^[32] The painting was repurchased by the Kimbell for $5.7 million at a sale by Christie's in April 2007.^[33][34]

Between 1 October 2007 and 21 September 2008, the first major exhibition of Turner's work in the United States in more than forty years came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Dallas Museum of Art. It included over 140 paintings, more than half of which were from the Tate.

The Turner Contemporary gallery was built in Margate to celebrate the association of the artist with the town.^[35]

The "Turner and his painters" exhibition (Tate Britain, London, 23 September 2009 to 31 January 2010, Paris, Grand Palais, 22 February to 24 May 2010) retraces and illustrates the development of Turner's personal vision, through the many chance or deliberate, but always opportune and enriching interaction that influenced his remarkable career. Nearly 100 paintings and other graphic works (studies and engravings) from major British and American collections, as well as the Louvre and the Prado were on show.^[36]

On 7 July 2010, Turner's final painting of Rome, Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino, from 1839, was bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum at a Sotheby's auction in London for $44.9 million. In January 2011 The Painter, a biographical play on his life by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, premiered at the Arcola Theatre in London.

[edit]Selected works

Turner was an extremely prolific artist who produced over 550 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolours, 30,000 paper works.^[37] The Tate Gallery in London produces the most comprehensive and up to date catalogue of Turner works in held by both public and private collections worldwide.

• 1796–Fishermen at Sea, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 1/8 in., Tate Gallery, London
• 1806–The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory, oil on canvas–Tate Gallery, London
• 1809–The Trout Stream, oil on canvas, Taft Museum, Cincinnati
• 1812–Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London
• 1815–Dido Building Carthage, or, The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London
• 1815–Crossing the Brook, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London
• 1817–Eruption of Vesuvius, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT
• 1817–Raby Castle, the Seat of the Earl of Darlington, oil on canvas, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
• 1822–The Battle of Trafalgar, oil on canvas, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
• 1829–Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London
• 1834–Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington
• 1835–The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
• 1835–The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, oil on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland
• 1835–The Grand Canal, Venice, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• 1835–The Piazzetta, Venice, Watercolour and bodycolour with pen and ink and scraping on paper, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
• 1838–The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken up, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London
• 1840–Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• 1842-The Blue Rigi, Sunrise, watercolour on paper, Tate Britain, London
• 1843–The Evening of the Deluge, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington
• 1844–Approach to Venice, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington
• 1844–Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London
• c.1845–Sunrise with Sea Monsters, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London
• c.1840-1850–Europa and the Bull, oil on canvas, Taft Museum, Cincinnati

[edit]