Joseph Turner

I Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in Covent Garden, London on April 23, 1775 and I died December 19, 1851. I was an English Romantic landscape artist, my style has be said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism.

My father, William Turner, was a wig-maker who later became a barber. My mother, Mary Marshall, a housewife, became increasingly mentally unstable during her early years, perhaps in part due to the early death of my younger sister in 1786. She died in 1804, having been committed to a mental asylum.

In 1785 I was sent to stay with my uncle in Brentford, which was then a small town west of London on the banks of the Thames. It was here that I first expressed an interest in painting. A year later I went to school in Margate in Kent to the east of London in the area of the Thames estuary. At this time I had been creating many paintings, which my father exhibited in his shop window. I entered the Royal Academy of Art schools when I was only 14 years old. I was accepted when I was 15 years old. I was interested in being a part of the Royal Academy of Art unlike some of my contemporaries. At first I showed a keen interest in architecture but was advised to keep to painting by the architect Thomas Hardwick (junior). Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Royal Academy at that time, chaired the panel that admitted me. A watercolour of mine was accepted for the Summer Exhibition of 1790 after only one year's study. I exhibited my first oil painting in 1796. Throughout the rest of my life, I regularly exhibited at the academy. I am commonly known as "the painter of light". Although renowned for my oils, I am also regarded as one of the founders of English watercolour landscape painting.

One of my most famous oil paintings is The fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, painted in 1839, which hangs in the National Gallery, London. I travelled widely in Europe, starting with France and Switzerland in 1802 and studying in the Louvre in Paris in the same year. I also made many visits to Venice during my lifetime. On a visit to Lyme Regis, in Dorset, England, I painted a stormy scene (now in the Cincinnati, Ohio Art Museum). I never married, although I had a mistress, Sarah Danby, by whom I had two daughters. As I grew older, I became more eccentric. I had few close friends, except for my father, who lived with me for thirty years, eventually working as my studio assistant. My father died in 1829, which had a profound effect on me, and thereafter I was subject to bouts of depression.

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