Brief Biography-Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in Covent Garden, London, above his father’s barbershop. His talent at a young age gained him entry to the Royal Academy Schools for free tuition. He studied alongside Thomas Malton, the older brother of James Malton, who were both painters of architectural views. For three years, he worked with the watercolourist Thomas Girtin whose precise etchings inspired him at the Monro School. Unfortunately, Girtin died at the young age of twenty-seven.
In 1790, the Royal Academy exhibited his first watercolour, and in 1802 he became a full member. That same year, he made the first of his visits to France and Switzerland and was to begin visiting Italy in 1819, making countless landscape sketches, as he did on all his travels.
Turner had become very successful at this time. He lived in Harley Street, where he held exhibitions and built a house in Twickenham. In 1833, he developed a relationship with Mrs Booth, a landlady he met in Margate; they stayed together for the rest of his life.
Turner’s success as a leading landscape artist encountered enmity from George Beaumont, a patron of John Constable; however, Sir Thomas Lawrence supported his work. From his impressions of Italy, he imbued his paintings with a colourful light like no other artist. In addition, the landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain had a gripping influence on him.
In 1843, John Ruskin praised his career in what he entitled Modern Painters: their superiority in the art of landscape painting to all the ancient masters proved by examples of the true, the beautiful and the intellectual, from the works of modern artists, especially from those of J.M.W. Turner, Esq., R.A. In 1851 he died in Chelsea and his remains lie in St. Paul’s Cathedral.