J. M. W. Turner Prints

About J. M. W. Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in April 1775 above his father's barber shop in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1789 at fourteen, trained as a topographical draughtsman under Thomas Malton, and exhibited watercolours at the Academy from 1790; he was elected a full Academician in 1802, at twenty-seven. For the rest of his life he toured Britain and the Continent every summer filling sketchbooks, and worked them up in London through the winter. The Liber Studiorum, about seventy mezzotints issued between 1806 and 1819, set out his theory of landscape. His late oils, The Fighting Temeraire, The Slave Ship, Snow Storm and Rain, Steam and Speed, dissolve ships, trains and weather into light and were mocked for it by critics who could not see where the subject had gone. He died in Chelsea in December 1851 and left his studio contents to the nation: around three hundred canvases and some nineteen thousand sketches and watercolours, now at Tate Britain. Turner's paintings are about atmosphere rather than things, and atmosphere is what a print keeps: the glow at the horizon, the steam, the sun coming through.