Joseph Mallord William Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in 1775 at Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, where his father kept a barber and wig-making shop. With little formal schooling, he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1789 at the age of fourteen, exhibiting his first watercolour the following year and his first oil, Fishermen at Sea, in 1796. Elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1799 and a full Academician in 1802, he was appointed Professor of Perspective in 1807, a post he held for thirty years.

Turner travelled relentlessly: the Swiss Alps in 1802, the Low Countries, repeated tours of Italy beginning in 1819, and countless sketching trips through Britain. He filled small sketchbooks with rapid pencil studies that he worked up into finished oils and watercolours months or years later. His early topographical manner gradually gave way to sweeping, almost abstract treatments of light, weather, and sea, exemplified by The Fighting Temeraire (1839), The Slave Ship (1840), and Rain, Steam and Speed (1844).

Though critics sometimes derided his yellow hazes and dissolved forms, John Ruskin championed him in Modern Painters from 1843. Turner never married; he lived with his father until 1829, then later with Sophia Caroline Booth in Chelsea under the name "Mr Booth." He died at Cheyne Walk on 19 December 1851 and was buried in St Paul's Cathedral.

Under his will, more than 300 oil paintings and some 19,000 drawings and watercolours passed to the British nation.