Joseph Mallord William Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in London, April 23, 1775 and died in London, December 19, 1851.

Turner entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1789 and exhibited his first work there in 1790. For the next six decades, he would be one of the Academy's most regular contributors. The topographical views for which he gained recognition in the 1790s demonstrate his knowledge of the work of Richard Wilson, as well as his direct experience of the mountains of Wales and northern England. He was elected a full member of the Royal Academy in 1802, and in the same year made his first trip to continental Europe, visiting Switzerland and France. A great admirer of the seventeenth-century classical landscape painter Claude Lorrain, Turner emulated Claude's Liber Veritatis in his own Liber Studiorum, a series of engravings after his own paintings published from 1807 to 1819. Turner returned repeatedly to the Continent, traveling to Italy in 1819 for the first of three times. His important patrons included the Earl of Egremont, whose estate at Petworth Turner often visited in the late 1820s and early 1830s, and the Scottish landowner H. A. J. Munro of Novar. However, it is John Ruskin, who published a passionate defense of Turner in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), with whom Turner is most closely associated. On his death, the artist bequeathed to the British nation a magnificent gift of some 300 oil paintings and over 20,000 drawings, which form the core of what is today the Clore Gallery at the Tate Britain Museum, London.