Biography

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on the 23rd of April in 1775 in London. His father, William Gayone Turner, was a barber while his mother, Mary Marshall, was an eccentric woman who, after the death of one of her daughters, started showing signs of mental illness from 1785 and was admitted to many hospitals before dying in 1804. Also, when he was eight years old, one of his younger sisters died. At the age of ten, Turner was sent to his maternal uncle, Joseph Mallord William Marshall, in Brentford, a small town on the west banks of the River Thames. The following year, Turner was sent to Margate, a seaside town in Kent. Both places affected his artistic production because it is where he started his first paintings and where his love for the seaside begun. Since a very young age he showed interest in architectural studies but was advised by Thomas Hardwick to focus on painting. He entered the Royal Academy of Art at the age of 15. His first watercolour, A View of the Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth was exhibited that very summer. He travelled to Europe, starting with France, Switzerland and Italy (Venice).

 Important support for his work came from Walter Ramsden Fawkes, who became a close friend of his. Turner was also a frequent guest of George O’Brien Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont, and painted scenes for him that still can nowadays be seen in Petworth House. Remarkable is also his friendship with Thomas Monro, a doctor who at the time used to gather young artists so they could see with their own eyes masterpieces he owned thanks to one of his patients, John Robert Cozens, a painter that suffered mental illness but was very talented.   Other than the aforementioned, Turner had few close friends except for his father, that’s why when he died in 1829, Turner began to be subject to bouts of depression. He never married but he is said to have had a few relationships and he probably was a father to two daughters.

Turner died of cholera at the home of Sophia Caroline Booth, in Chelsea, on 19 December 1851. He is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, where he lies near to Sir Joshua Reynold, a fellow painter.