Turner sold stormy light while critics sniffed at his class
Joseph Mallord William Turner, born in Covent Garden on 23 April 1775, entered the Royal Academy Schools at fourteen and became a Royal Academician at twenty-seven. Roughly 550 oils and over 2,000 watercolours followed before his death in 1851, leaving Monet and Pissarro a map of atmosphere.
The barber's son from Maiden Lane climbed fast: by his early twenties wealthy collectors paid top prices for his oils, and at twenty-one Fishermen at Sea sealed his marine reputation. Dutch Boats in a Gale, shown in 1801, hung opposite the Great Room entrance and helped elect him the Academy's second-youngest Academician the next year. Aristocratic critics still needled his working-class origins even as he opened a private gallery in 1804 to bypass dealers and group canvases his own way.
He treated landscape as a laboratory for sunlight, fog, storm, and cloud, sketching across England and Europe and later pushing toward abstraction that puzzled contemporaries yet now ranks among his peaks. A twelve-year Liber Studiorum of more than seventy mezzotints commercially flopped yet helped lift landscape above its old place beneath history painting and portraiture. He could mimic Rembrandt, Rubens, Claude, and Dutch marine masters, then twist each homage into saleable originality—Bridgewater once paid 250 guineas for a marine pendant.
He never married; a long liaison with housekeeper Sarah Danby is thought to have produced daughters Evelina and Georgiana, and in old age he sheltered with Sophia Caroline Booth in Chelsea under the alias Mr Booth. Dying rich at seventy-six, he left the nation about a hundred finished oils, two hundred unfinished ones, and tens of thousands of works on paper; cousins fought the £140,000 fortune until 1856, while Tate Britain's Clore Gallery finally housed the bequest in 1987—136 years late.
Source: J. M. W. Turner
