// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhy was J.M.W. Turner's art sad? It was a turn for the worse.

Not to be confused with the painter William Turner of Oxford.

Joseph Mallord William Turner RA
Self-Portrait, c. 1799
Born	Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-04-23)23 April 1775 London, England
Died	19 December 1851(1851-12-19) (aged 76) London, England
Resting place	St Paul's Cathedral
Education	Royal Academy of Arts
Known for	Paintings
Notable work	The Fighting Temeraire Rain, Steam and Speed The Slave Ship Snow Storm
Movement	Romanticism
Signature

Joseph Mallord William Turner (London, 23 April 1775 – London, 19 December 1851), known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter and elevated the status of landscape painting. Turner is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential British painters, as well as a precursor to Impressionism.

Turner started his career as a watercolourist, achieved fame and financial success as an oil painter and was also an expert printmaker. His later paintings challenged classicisist artistic conventions and were rejected by critics but are considered today his most important works. Their expressionistic renditions of light and atmosphere inspired the early impressionists Monet and Pissarro when they saw them in London in 1870, 20 years after Turner's death.

A child prodigy, Turner was accepted as a student at the Royal Academy of Arts when he was only 14 years old and had a rapid ascent to recognition, fame and financial success. He exhibited his first work in the Academy's Annual Exhibition at 15. By his early twenties, he was selling his paintings at top market prices to wealthy art collectors and gaining high praises from the academic establishment. At 27, Turner was elected as a Royal Academician – the highest status in the institution – becoming the youngest artist to achieve this distinction in the Academy's history.

In spite of these accomplishments, he was sneered at during his whole career by some influential critics and less successful academicians due to his low social origins. This motivated Turner to distance himself from the Academy and open his own gallery, but he always held the institution in the highest regard. His contemporaries report that he never expressed negative criticism of his fellow academicians. Later in life, he became increasingly reclusive.

Turner's artistic style evolved significantly during his lifetime. He started by imitating old masters; a conscious strategy to gain academic recognition. He was also keenly aware of what wealthy art collectors craved.

In his thirties, after becoming a Royal Academician and achieving financial success, he started painting in an increasingly impressionistic and abstract style, using landscape sketches from his extensive travels throughout Europe as inspiration. He experimented with the representation of light, fog and landscape, with some of his most notable paintings using a vortex as a central compositional element. These departures from established artistic traditions were not understood at the time and generated very negative criticism and even disrespectful comments. Some speculated that he was losing his eyesight. Paintings from his final years could be classified as late impressionism or even modern art.

Turner was attracted to printmaking and he mastered the different printmaking techniques. He especially liked creating mezzotints, and spent 12 years completing a collection of 71 prints using this technique, which he called the Liber Studiorum (Book of Studies). The collection was highly praised and was a key factor in elevating the status of landscape painting.

Turner died in London in 1851, aged 76. He was a prolific artist, producing about 550 oil paintings and over 2,000 watercolours during his lifetime. In an unpredecented gesture, he bequeathed to the nation about 300 oil paintings, worth a fortune as a whole. The bequeath also included 30,000 watercolours and drawings and 280 sketchbooks. Many of the oil paintings and the main watercolours are displayed at London's Tate Britain and National Gallery museums.

Biography

Childhood

The house in Maiden Lane where Turner was born, c.1850s (as depicted by Frances Elizabeth Wynne).

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on April 1775 in Maiden Lane in the Covent Garden London district, where he lived his first 24 years. A younger sister, Mary Ann, died in childhood.

Turner's father, William Turner, had a barbershop in the first floor, where he also sold wigs. By the time Turner was 10, his father proudly displayed his young son's drawings in the window, which were sold for a few shillings. and helped Turner get his early start as an aspiring painter. His father boasted to the artist Thomas Stothard that: "My son, sir, is going to be a painter". His father would later retire as a barber to assist Turner in running his studio and paint gallery.

His mother, Mary Marshall, came from a family of butchers. Showing signs of mental disorder, Turner's father was forced to place her in St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics and she was later moved to Bethlem Hospital (a mental asylum known as "bedlam"), where she died in 1804.

In 1785, when he was 10 years old, his father sent him to live with his maternal uncle, Joseph Mallord William Marshall, a butcher in Brentford, then a small town on the banks of the River Thames west of London, where he attended elementary school. The earliest known artistic exercise from this period is a series of simple colourings of engraved plates from Henry Boswell's Picturesque View of the Antiquities of England and Wales. A year later, he was sent to Margate on the north-east Kent coast. There, he produced a series of drawings of the town and surrounding area. In 1789, Turner again stayed with his uncle, who had retired to Sunningwell (then in Berkshire, now part of Oxfordshire). A whole sketchbook of work from this time survives, as well as a watercolour of Oxford. The use of pencil sketches and watercolours on location, as the foundation for later finished paintings, formed the basis of Turner's essential working style during his whole career.

Adult life

In 1804 he opened a private gallery; a very unusual action at the time. Always commercially savvy, it provided an alternate way to sell his paintings other than the Academy's annual exhibition.

During his 60-year career, the river Thames was his favourite subject, depicting it in hundreds of artworks. This fascination motivated him to choose several secondary homes on or very near the river. For 7 years he rented houses in Isleworth and then in Hammersmith, modifying a boat into a floating studio. In 1811 he bought Sandycombe Lodge, a rural villa in the riverside town of Twickenham. Since Turner's explorations of rough, mountainous terrain across England and Europe had made him a resilient walker, he regularly made the 10 mile journey on foot between Sandycombe and his Harley Street house. Finally, in his seventies, he rented  a cottage in front of the Thames in Chelsea under the pseudonym "Mr. Booth", to protect his privacy.

Career

Many early sketches by Turner were architectural studies or exercises in perspective, and it is known that, as a young man, he worked for several architects, including Thomas Hardwick, James Wyatt and Joseph Bonomi the Elder. By the end of 1789, he had also begun to study under the topographical draughtsman Thomas Malton, who specialised in London views. Turner learned from him the basic tricks of the trade, copying and colouring outline prints of British castles and abbeys. He would later call Malton "My real master". Topography was a thriving industry by which a young artist could pay for his studies.

The Academy

Turner was recognized as a child prodigy and was accepted as a student in the Royal Academy Schools in 1789, at the age of 14. He was an accomplished student and made very rapid progress. Only a year after starting his studies, the watercolour A View of the Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth was accepted to the Academy's Annual Exhibition.

Turner's early watercolours were inspired by his travels throughout Britain, particularly to Wales, where he made a large number of sketches. These were mainly focused on architectural work, which made use of his skills as a draughtsman. He showed an early interest in architecture but was advised by Hardwick to focus on painting.

In 1793, he showed the oil titled The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, which foreshadowed his later climatical effects. The British writer Peter Cunningham, in his obituary of Turner, wrote that it was: "recognised by the wiser few as a noble attempt at lifting landscape art out of the tame insipidities ... [and] evinced for the first time that mastery of effect for which he is now justly celebrated".

Works exhibited early in his career in the annual Royal Academy Exhibition

• 
  First artwork exhibited: A View of the Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth, watercolour (1790)
• 
  First oil painting exhibited: Fishermen at Sea (1796)
• 
  Dutch Boats in a Gale (1801) won him his membership as an Academician.

At the age of 21, he exhibited his first oil, Fishermen at Sea, a dramatic moonlit seascape. The work was praised by contemporary critics and established Turner's reputation as both an oil painter and a painter of maritime scenes. In Wilton's appreciation, the painting is "a summary of all that had been said about the sea by the artists of the 18th century."

Dutch Boats in a Gale, presented in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1801 "took the Academy by storm", It was hung in the best location: in the Great Room, centered, and opposite to the entrance. It so impressed the Academy and the art critics that the following year Turner was admitted as a Royal Academician. At only 27 years of age, he became the youngest artist in the institution's history to achieve the highest academic recognition in England.

Patrons

While still in his early twenties, Turner was able to generate a steady income and increasing recognition by imitating the styles of old masters. In October 1798, Turner confided to his friend Joseph Farington that "he had more commissions at present than he could execute and got more money than he expended."

Even though the war between England and France had considerably reduced the demand for large historical paintings, Turner was receiving substantial commissions for them from wealthy patrons. In 1799, Turner had received 150 guineas for The Fifth Plague of Egypt from the extremely rich William Beckford. In 1801, Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater paid him 250 guineas (equivalent to over £20,000 today) for the marine painting Dutch Boats in a Gale.

During his life, Turner made paintings in the style of painters including Raphael, Canaletto, Claude Lorrain, Titian, Nicolas Poussin, Rembrandt, Rubens, Veronese, and Watteau, among others. In doing so, he was following the teachings of Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Academy, who taught that painters should imitate the style of old masters. However, Turner's natural talent allowed him to go beyond pastiches and show he could make their style his own. They were also a sort of homage (and in some cases an indirect critique) of the old masters. According to Hamilton, "this playful chameleon tendency was extraordinarily disarming and had the effect of seducing the collector, catching him off guard."

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 Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army 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 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 20 paintings, the largest collection of his work outside the Tate.

Critics

Charles Turner, c.1840, Portrait of J. M. W. Turner, making his sketch for the celebrated picture of 'Mercury & Argus' (exhibited in 1836)

Turner's humble origins would create resentments and insidious comments from the more Patrician members of the Academy, in particular from Sir George Beaumont, an amateur painter but very influential in the art community and disdainful of "modern" styles, who publicly called him a ‘little Reptile’ and probably instigated criticism of his treatment of the sea, eventually coining the phrase ‘white painter’ as a pejorative term.

In 1804 Turner distanced himself from the Academy but he had other ways to show and sell his work; in 1799 he had created his own gallery, run by his proud father, and "for over a decade it was a regular feature of the London exhibition season"

Italy and the Grand Tour

Turner first travelled to continental Europe during the Peace of Amiens in 1802. He started in France where he studied in the Louvre in Paris, and visited Switzerland in the same year before undertaking many visits to Italy. His Italian travels, often associated with the tradition of the Grand Tour, became central to the development of his mature style. In 1819, Turner made his first extended journey through Italy, travelling through Turin, Milan, Como, Venice, Rome, Naples and other cities while producing numerous sketches and watercolours. Venice in particular became one of his most important subjects, inspiring works such as ''Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute'' (1835), ''Venice, the Bridge of Sighs'' (1840), and ''The Sun of Venice Going to Sea'' (1843).

Turner and the Thames

The shores of the river Thames were his first destination for sketching trips and his first subject for an oil painting. With the exception of the sea, the Thames is the most repeated subject in his work. Born only a few yards from the river, he always lived on or very close to it: in Isleworth, Hammersmith, and finally in Twickenham.

During 1805 Turner systematically sketched places along much of the river, from Oxford to the Thames Estuary. Working largely outside, Turner sketchs are bold and fresh, seeking novel ways to describe what he was seeing. The experimental watercolours and even some oil paintings he made en plein air could not have originated within the confines of a studio. Moorby comments on Turner's artistic skill in depicting the shores of the Thames: "The simpler something is, the harder it can be to do well, but [he was] exceptionally skillful at representing living, moving things with painterly abbreviations, distilling the essence of the physical world into a matrix of gestural brushstrokes."

Later 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 on him, and thereafter, he was subject to bouts of depression. He never married but had a relationship with an older widow, his housekeeper, Sarah Danby. He is believed to have been the father of her two daughters Evelina Dupuis and Georgiana Thompson. Evelina married Joseph Dupuis on 31 October 1817. It was recorded that her mother, Sarah Danby, was a witness along with Charles Thompson.

Turner, painted from memory by Linnell (1838)

Turner formed a relationship with Sophia Caroline Booth after her second husband died, and from 1846 he lived with her as "Mr Booth" or "Admiral Booth" in her house at 6 Davis's Place (now Cheyne Walk) in Chelsea, until his death in December 1851.

Turner formed a short but intense friendship with the artist Edward Thomas Daniell. The painter David Roberts wrote of him that, "He adored Turner, when I and others doubted, and taught me to see & to distinguish his beauties over that of others ... the old man really had a fond & personal regard for this young clergyman, which I doubt he ever evinced for the other".

Daniell may have supplied Turner with the spiritual comfort he needed after the deaths of his father and friends, and to "ease the fears of a naturally reflective man approaching old age". After Daniell's death in Lycia at the age of 38, he told Roberts he would never form such a friendship again.

Before leaving for the Middle East, Daniell commissioned Turner's portrait from John Linnell. Turner had previously refused to sit for the artist, and it was difficult to get his agreement to be portrayed. Daniell positioned the two men opposite each other at dinner, so that Linnell could observe his subject carefully and portray his likeness from memory.

Death and bequest

Turner died in London in 1851, aged 76, at the residence of Sophia Booth, the woman believed to be his common law wife. He is buried in St Paul's Cathedral, where he lies near the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds.

In an unpredecented gesture, he bequeathed to the nation about 300 oil paintings. These were worth a fortune, considering that his oil paintings had been regularly purchased for 250 to 400 guineas each; today's equivalent of £20,000 to £30,000. The bequest also included 30,000 watercolours and drawings and 280 sketchbooks, as well as a large cash donation to the Royal Academy to support young artists with limited financial means. Many of the oil paintings and the main watercolours are displayed at London's Tate Britain and National Gallery museums. The sketchbooks and lesser works are kept in the archives of the National Gallery.

Turners House, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, 1887 by Philip Norman

Art

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". Turner was recognised as an artistic genius; the English art critic John Ruskin described him as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature".

Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water, 1840, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Turner's imagination was sparked by shipwrecks, fires (including the burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner witnessed first-hand, and transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen at the 1840 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition, where The Slave Ship (1840), and Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water (1840) were first shown. A 2003 exhibition at the Clark Art Institute suggested these two paintings were pendants, due in part to their similar content and size.

Turner's work drew criticism from contemporaries. An anonymous reviewer of the 1840 Royal Academy exhibition, later identified as John Eagles, called the displayed paintings "absurd extravagances [that] disgrace the Exhibition". Sir George Beaumont, a landscape painter and fellow member of the Royal Academy, described his paintings as "blots".

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. The idea was loosely based on Claude Lorrain's Liber Veritatis (Book of Truth), where Claude had recorded his completed paintings; a series of print copies of these drawings, by then at Devonshire House, had been a huge publishing success. Turner's plates were meant to be widely disseminated, and categorised the genre into six types: Marine, Mountainous, Pastoral, Historical, Architectural, and Elevated or Epic Pastoral. 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.

His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stay true to the traditions of English landscape. In Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature has 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.

In Turner's 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 recognisable. 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. He is also generally regarded as a precursor of abstract painting.

High levels of volcanic ash in the atmosphere (from the eruption of Mount Tambora) 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 said that an early patron, Thomas Monro, Principal Physician of Bedlam, and a collector and amateur artist, 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 his friend Girtin, 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.

Together with some young artists in Monro's London house, Turner copied works of the major topographical draughtsmen of his time and honed his drawing skills. However, some of John Robert Cozens's watercolours were present in Monro's house, which were more vibrant than the neat topographic renderings. These works demonstrated to the young Turner that the watercolour medium could prove artistically beneficial, via its value placed on mood instead of information.

Materials

Turner experimented with a wide variety of pigments. He used formulations like carmine, despite knowing that they were not long-lasting, and against the advice of contemporary experts to use more durable pigments. As a result, many of his colours have now faded. Ruskin complained at how quickly his work decayed; Turner was indifferent to posterity and chose materials that looked good when freshly applied. By 1930, there was concern that both his oils and his watercolours were fading.

Gallery

• 
  Fisherman's Cottage, Dover, 1790 Yale Center for British Art
• 
  Clare Hall and King's College Chapel, Cambridge, from the Banks of the River Cam, 1793, watercolour, Yale Center for British Art
• 
  The Angler, 1794, Yale Center for British Art
• 
  Morning Among the Coniston Fells, 1798, Tate Britain
• 
  Calais Pier, 1803, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London
• 
  London from Greenwich Park, 1809, oil on canvas, Tate Britain
• 
  Saltash with the Water Ferry, 1811, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art
• 
  Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, 1812, oil on canvas, Tate Britain
• 
  Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort packet-boat from Rotterdam becalmed, 1818, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art
• 
  The Field of Waterloo, 1818, Tate Britain
• 
  Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet Boat in the Evening, 1826, Frick Collection
• 
  Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore, c. 1834, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
• 
  Wreckers, Coast of Northumberland, 1834 , oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art
• 
  The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834, oil on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art
• 
  The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834, c. 1835, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art
• 
  Valley of Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche and Thunderstorm, 1836–37, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago
• 
  The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London
• 
  The Slave Ship, 1840, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• 
  Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, c. 1842, oil on canvas, Tate Britain
• 
  The Evening of the Deluge, c. 1843, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
• 
  Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London
• 
  Norham Castle, Sunrise, c. 1845, oil on canvas, Tate Britain
• 
  The Wreck Buoy, c. 1849, Sudley House
• 
  The Departure of the Fleet, 1850, National Gallery, London

Legacy

Turner left a small fortune, which he hoped would be used to support what he called "decayed artists". He planned an almshouse at Twickenham in west London with a gallery for some of his works. His will was contested, and in 1856, after a court battle, his first cousins, including Thomas Price Turner, received part of his fortune. Another portion went to the Royal Academy of Arts, which occasionally awards students the Turner Medal. His finished paintings were bequeathed to the British nation, and he intended that a special gallery would be built to house them. This did not happen because there was disagreement over the final site. Twenty-two years after his death, the British Parliament passed an act allowing his paintings to be lent to museums outside London, beginning a process of dispersing the pictures that Turner had wished to be kept together.

One of the greatest collectors of his work was Henry Vaughan, who, when he died in 1899, owned more than one hundred watercolours and drawings by Turner and as many prints. His collection included examples of almost every type of work on paper the artist produced, from early topographical drawings and atmospheric landscape watercolours, to brilliant colour studies, literary vignette illustrations and spectacular exhibition pieces. It included nearly a hundred proofs of Liber Studiorum and twenty-three drawings connected with it. It was an unparalleled collection that comprehensively represented the diversity, imagination and technical inventiveness of Turner's work throughout his sixty-year career. Vaughan bequeathed most of his Turner collection to British and Irish public galleries and museums, stipulating that the collections of Turner's watercolours should be 'exhibited to the public all at one time, free of charge and only in January', demonstrating an awareness of conservation which was unusual at the time.

In 1910, the main part of the Turner Bequest, which includes unfinished paintings and drawings, was rehoused in the Duveen Turner Wing at the National Gallery of British Art (now Tate Britain). In 1987, a new wing at the Tate, the Clore Gallery, was opened to house the Turner bequest although 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 remain constantly and permanently in Turner's Gallery.

St. Mary's Church, Battersea, added a commemorative stained glass window for Turner, between 1976 and 1982. St Paul's Cathedral, Royal Academy of Arts and the Victoria & Albert Museum all hold statues representing him. A portrait 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. The City of Westminster unveiled a memorial plaque at the site of his birthplace at 21 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, on 2 June 1999.

Selby Whittingham founded The Turner Society 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. The Tate created the prestigious annual Turner Prize art award in 1984, named in Turner's honour, and 20 years later, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours founded the Winsor & Newton Turner Watercolour Award. A major exhibition, "Turner's Britain", with material (including The Fighting Temeraire) on loan from around the globe, was held at Birmingham Museum and 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.

The Turner Prize, created in 1984, is presented every year to a British visual artist, and includes a cash award of £40,000. In keeping with Turner's resolve to challenge established artistic traditions, it is awarded to artists that aspire to change the norms so it usually generates controversy and media coverage.

The Bank of England announced that a portrait of Turner, with a backdrop of The Fighting Temeraire, would appear on the £20 note beginning in 2020. The Turner £20 note entered circulation on Thursday, 20 February 2020.

In popular culture

Leo McKern played Turner in The Sun Is God, a 1974 Thames Television production directed by Michael Darlow. The programme aired on 17 December 1974, during the Turner Bicentenary Exhibition in London.

British filmmaker Mike Leigh wrote and directed Mr. Turner, a biopic of Turner's later years, released in 2014. The film stars Timothy Spall as Turner, Dorothy Atkinson, Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson, and premiered in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, with Spall taking the award for Best Actor.

See also

• List of paintings by J. M. W. Turner

Bibliography

Biographies

• >Bailey, Anthony (1998). Standing in the Sun: A Life of J. M. W. Turner. London: Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6604-4.
• >>Bailey, A. (2013) J.M.W. Turner: Standing in the Sun: A Life of J.M.T. Turner. London: Tate Enterprises Ltd.
• >Butlin, M. and Joll, E. (1977) The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
• Finberg, A. J. (1961) [1939]. The Life of J. M. W. Turner, R.A. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• >Hamilton, James (2007). Turner. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-8129-6791-3.
• Lindsay, J. (1966) Turner: His Life and Work. Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society.
• Moyle, Franny (2016). Turner: The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J.M.W. Turner. Penguin/Random House. ISBN 978-0-241-96456-9.
• >Moorby, N. (2025). Turner and Constable: Art, Life, and Landscape. London: Yale University Press, 2025. ISBN 978-0300275810.
• >Shanes, Eric (2004). Turner: The Life and Masterworks (3 ed.). New York: Parkstone Press. ISBN 978-1-85995-905-3.
• >Walker, J. (1983) Joseph Mallord William Turner. Concise ed. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. ISBN 978-0-8109-1679-1.
• >Wilton, Andrew (2006) [1987]. Turner in His Time (revised ed.). London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-23830-1.

Further reading

• Ackroyd, Peter (2005). J. M. W. Turner. Ackroyd's Brief Lives. New York: Nan A. Talese. ISBN 0-385-50798-4.
• Barker, Elizabeth E (October 2004). "Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)". Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• Bockemühl, Michael (2015) [1991]. J. M. W. Turner, 1775–1851: The World of Light and Colour. Köln: Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8228-6325-1.
• Hamilton, James (1998). Turner and the Scientists. London: Tate Publishing. ISBN 978-1-85437-255-0.
• Harrison, Colin (2000). Turner's Oxford. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum.
• Hill, David (2008). Turner and Leeds: Image of Industry. Jeremy Mills Publishing.
• Joll, Evelyn; Butlin, Martin; Herrmann, Luke, eds. (2001). The Oxford Companion to J. M. W. Turner. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. ISBN 0-19-860025-9.
• Singh, Iona (2012). "J.M.W. Turner as Producer". Color, Facture, Art & Design. Winchester, UK; Washington, DC: Zero Books. pp. 129–152. ISBN 978-1-78099-629-5.
• Townsend, Joyce (1993). Turner's Painting Techniques. London: Tate Publishing. ISBN 978-1-85437-202-4. Retrieved 27 March 2025. Catalogue of a 1993 exhibit at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain).
• Venning, Barry (2003). Turner. Berlin: Phaidon Verlag GmbH. ISBN 0-7148-3988-4.
• Wallace, Robert K. (1992). Melville & Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright. The University of Georgia Press. ISBN 0-8203-1366-1. "Wallace explores the stylistic and aesthetic affinities of English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) and American novelist Herman Melville, establishing Turner as a decisive influence on the creation of Melville's Moby-Dick". (Quotation from dust jacket)
• Warburton, Stanley (2008). Discovering Turner's Lakeland. Lytham St Annes: Stanley Warburton.
• Williams, Roger (2018). A Year of Turner and the Thames. London: Bristol Book Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9928466-9-5.
• Wilton, Andrew (1982). J. M. W. Turner: France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland. New York: George Braziller. ISBN 978-0807610466.
• Whittingham, Selby (1993–1996). An Historical Account of the Will of J. M. W. Turner, R.A. London: J. M. W. Turner, R.A., Publications.

External links

• "Turner, Joseph Mallord William" . Encyclopedia Americana. 1920.
• 400 artworks by or after J. M. W. Turner at the Art UK site
• The Turner Society
• Turner & the 1834 Parliament Fire – UK Parliament Living Heritage
• J.M.W. Turner exhibition catalogs
• Web site of the Tate Turner Collection, includes the "Turner Bequest" of over 300 Oil paintings and over 30,000 sketches. The catalogue holds records of over 40,000 works by Turner
• Works by J. M. W. Turner at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about J. M. W. Turner at the Internet Archive
• A Brief History of Abstract Art with Turner, Mondrian and More
• "Turner's Whaling Pictures", The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 73, no. 4 (Spring, 2016); Turner’s Whaling Pictures exhibition
• Johnson, Ken (3 June 2016). "In Turner Paintings at the Met, the Bloody Business of Whaling". The New York Times. pp. C23. ProQuest 2310050465.
• Rocks at Colgong on the Ganges., engraved by Edward Goodall for Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1839, with a poetical illustration by Letitia Elizabeth Landon.
• Turner and the Sea. Watercolours from the Tate 2002 exhibition at the Fundación Juan March, Madrid
• "Splendid Lies" review by John Updike of J.M.W. Turner: an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1 October 2007 – 6 January 2008; the Dallas Museum of Art, 10 February – 18 May 2008; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1 July–21 September 2008.
• Turner's poems and other texts (Bibliotheca Augustana)
• Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports: Passages through Time 2017 exhibition at the Frick Collection
• "Turner 250, a year-long festival of events, is running now at the Tate Britain, London; Turner Contemporary, Margate, and galleries around the UK" Jones, Jonathan. "Why JMW Turner is still Britain’s best artist, 250 years on". The Guardian, 19 April 2025.
• Portraits of J. M. W. Turner at the National Portrait Gallery, London
• J.M.W. Turner: Watercolors from Tate 2019 exhibit at the Mystic Seaport Museum
• J.M.W. Turner: Quest for the Sublime 2020 exhibition at the Frist Art Museum
• Turner’s Modern World 2022 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston
• J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality 2025 exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art
• Turner and Constable 2025 exhibition at the Tate Britain