Joseph Mallord William Turner
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Joseph Mallord
William Turner was born in London in 1775. He was the son of Mary Marshall
and William Turner, a barber and wigmaker. As a child he already made
money with colouring engravings which he sold to his father’s costumers.
When his mother began suffering from health problems he moved to his aunt and
uncle in Bredford and there he started to attend John White’s School.
In the late 1780s he went back to London after he had completed school. There he worked under several architectural topographers. In December 1789 he attended the Royal Academy School, the only art school in England at that time, at the age of 14. When he was 18 years old he owned his own studio and began to travel through England.
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In the mid 1790s he worked together with Thomas Girtin for three years, with whom he worked out better techniques of water-colour painting. In 1796 under the influence of Richard Wilson and Claude Lorrain he took up oil pictures.
In 1802 he became a full member of the Royal Academy . There he worked as a professor of Perspective from 1807 until 1828.
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employment he began to travel around Europe. Especially Italy was a
country that impressed him very much. In Rome, Venice and Neapel, where
he went in1819 and 1840, he studied the bright light and colours.
Joseph Mallord William Turner never married, but he spent his time with his mistress and their three children. Although his fellows saw him as a genius he spent a secretive life and shunned the public. He died in Chelsea under an assumed name in 1851. William Turner was a great landscape painter and he was a forerunner of the early Impressionists.
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