son of William Turner, a barber and wigmaker
with architectural draughtsman Thomas Malton and architect Thomas Hardwick; Royal Academy (beginning 1779)
1791 –assistant scene-painter at Pantheon opera house, London
1796 – First Royal Academy (RA) exhibition: Fishermen at Sea
1799 – elected RA associate
1802 – becomes full member of the RA with acceptance of Dolbadam Castle, North Wales (RA, London)
1804 – opens gallery in Harley Street
1807 – elected Professor of Perspective at RA
1811 –begins lecturing at RA
1810s-20s – makes topographical illustrations: Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England (1814-26), History of Richmondshire (1819-23), Rivers of England and Wales (1832-1827)
1820s-30s – Turner travels throughout continental Europe sketching for a series of engravings: “Rivers of Europe”
1837 – resigns as Professor of Perspective at RA
1843 – John Ruskin’s Modern Painters is published; contains a long defense of Turner’s work
1856 – following legal proceedings over Turner’s will and bequest, all original works remaining in his possession are given to The National Gallery, London
Switzerland and France (1802); Italy (1819, 1828-29); frequent tours of Continental Europe
Richard Colt Hoare; William Anne Capel, 4th Earl of Essex; Edward Lascelles, 1st Earl of Harewood; Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater; George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont; Walter Ramsden Fawkes
Fishermen at Sea, 1796 (Tate, London)
Dido Building Carthage or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire, 1815 (National Gallery, London)
Fighting Temeraire Tugged to her Last Berth to Be Broken Up, 1838, 1839 (National Gallery, London)
Turner criticized Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) in an 1811 lecture:
“To Nicolas Poussin let me direct your observation. His love for the antique prompted his exertion and that love for the antique emanates through all his works. It clothes his figures, rears his buildings, disposes of his materials, arranges the whole of his picture and landscape and gives, whether from indifference or strength of his ground, a color that often removes his works from truth.”
First published in Jerrold Ziff, “’Backgrounds, Introductions of Architecture and Landscape,’ a Lecture by J.M.W. Turner, “ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 26 (1963), 133 ff; cited in Lorenz Eitner, Neoclassicism and Romanticism 1750-1850, vol. 2: Neoclassicism and Romanticism (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970), 94.
smarthistory: Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway
Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989
Boime, Albert. “Turner’s Slave Ship: The Victims of Empire,” Turner Studies, vol. 10 (Summer 1990): 34-43
Costello, Leo. "Turner's Slave-ship : Towards a Dialectical History Painting," Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis and Sarah Salih, eds., Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and Its Colonies 1660-1838. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2004, pp. 209-22.
Costello, Leo and J. M. W. Turner. J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012
Hamilton, James. Fields of Influence: Conjunctions of Artists and Scientists, 1815-1860. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2001
Hemingway, Andrew. Landscape and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992
Kennedy, Ian and Julian Treuherz. The Railway. Art in the Age of Steam. Exhibition catalogue. New Haven, CT and London: Yale Universtiy Press, 2008
Kriz, Kay Dian. The Idea of the English Landscape Painter. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1997
Matteson, Lynn R. “The Poetics and Politics of Alpine Passage: Turner’s Snowstorm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 62, no. 3 (September 1980): 385-98
McCoubrey, John. “Times Railway: Turner and the Great Western,” Turner Studies, vol. 6 (Summer 1986): 33-9
Rodner, William S. J.M.W. Turner: Romantic Painter of the Industrial Revolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997
Smiles, Sam. J.M.W. Turner: the Making of a Modern Artist. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007
Walker, Andrew. “From Private Sermon to Public Masterpiece: J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship in Boston, 1876-1899,” Journal of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, vol. 6 (1994): 4-13
Wilton, Andrew. Turner in His Time. London: Thames & Hudson, 1987