Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was born in Maiden Lane, near Covent Garden market in London, in the spring of 1775; the exact date is disputed. His father was a barber and wigmaker, and the boy’s talent was clear early. At fourteen, in 1789, he entered the schools of the Royal Academy, and a year later his first watercolour, a view of the Bishop’s Palace at Lambeth, was hung in its annual exhibition. He became an Associate in 1799 and a full Royal Academician in 1802, and from 1807 to 1838 he served as the Academy’s Professor of Perspective.
He started as a topographical watercolourist, travelling across Britain and later Europe on sketching tours, and then moved far beyond it. His ambition was to rival the great landscape painters of the past, above all Claude Lorrain, and in time colour, light and atmosphere came to dominate everything in his pictures. The Fighting Temeraire, shown in 1839, shows a Trafalgar warship towed to the breakers by a steam tug. Snowstorm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth followed in 1842, and Rain, Steam and Speed — The Great Western Railway in 1844, in which a locomotive dissolves into rain and light. Many contemporaries were baffled, but the critic John Ruskin defended him, and later painters, Monet among them, studied his methods.
Turner never married and lived a private, secretive life. He died in Chelsea on 19 December 1851 and is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, near Sir Joshua Reynolds. He bequeathed the contents of his studio, thousands of oil sketches, watercolours and drawings, to the British nation.