both the English national holiday, St George’s Day, and William Shakespeare’s birthday, although no verification of that claim has ever been found.) His father, William, was a wig-maker and barber. We know little about Turner’s mother, Mary (née Marshall), other than that she was mentally unbalanced, and that her instability was exacerbated by the fatal illness of Turner’s younger sister, who died in 1783. Because of the stresses put upon the family by these afflictions, in 1785 Turner was sent to stay with an uncle in Brentford, a small market town to the west of London. It was here he first went to school. Brentford was the county town of Middlesex, and had a long history of political radicalism, which may have surfaced much later in Turner’s work. But more importantly, the surroundings of the town – the rural stretches of the Thames downriver to Chelsea, and the countryside upriver to Windsor and beyond – must have struck the boy as Arcadian (especially after the squalid surroundings of Covent Garden), and done much to form his later visions of an ideal world.
By 1788 Turner was attending school in Margate, a small holiday resort on the Thames estuary far to the east of London. Some drawings from this stay have survived and they are remarkably precocious, especially in their grasp of the rudiments of perspective. His formal schooling apparently completed, by 1789 Turner was back in London and working under various architects or architectural topographers. They included Thomas Malton, the younger (1748–1804) whose influence on his work is discernible around this time.
On 11 December 1789 the first President of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), presided over a committee that admitted Turner to its Schools. The Royal Academy Schools was then the only regular art training establishment in Britain. Painting was not taught there – it would only appear on the curriculum in 1816 – and students merely learned to draw, initially from plaster casts of antique statuary and then, when deemed good enough, from the nude. It took the youth about two and a half years to make the move. Amongst the visitors or teachers in the life class were history painters such as James Barry RA and Henry Fuseli RA, whose lofty artistic aspirations would soon rub off on the young Turner.
Naturally, as Turner lived in the days before student grants, he had to earn his keep from the beginning. In 1790 he exhibited in a Royal Academy Exhibition for the first time, and with a few exceptions he went on participating in those annual displays of contemporary art until 1850. In that era the Royal Academy only mounted one exhibition every year, and consequently the show enjoyed far more impact than it does today, swamped as it now is by innumerable rivals (some of the best of which are mounted by the Royal Academy itself). Turner quickly provoked highly favourable responses to his vivacious and inventive offerings.
At the 1792 Royal Academy Exhibition Turner received a lesson that would eventually move his art into dimensions of light and colour previously unknown to painting. He was especially struck by a watercolour, Battle Abbey, by Michael Angelo Rooker ARA (1746–1801), and copied it twice in watercolour (the Rooker is today in the Royal Academy collection, London, while both of Turner’s copies reside in the Turner Bequest). Rooker was unusually adept in minutely differentiating the tones of masonry (tone being the range of a given colour from light to dark). The exceptionally rich spectrum of tones Rooker had deployed in his Battle Abbey demonstrated something vital to Turner. He emulated Rooker’s multiplicity of tones not only in his two copies but also in many elaborate drawings made later in 1792. Very soon the young artist attained the ability to differentiate tones with even more subtlety than the master he emulated.
The technical procedure used for such tonal variation was known as the “scale practice”, and it was rooted in the inherent nature of watercolour. Because watercolour is essentially a transparent medium, it requires its practitioners to work from light to dark (for it is very difficult to place a light mark over a darker one but not the reverse). Instead of mixing up a palette containing all of the many tones he required for a given image, Turner instead copied Rooker and mixed up merely one tone at a time before placing it at different locations across a sheet of paper. Then, while that work dried, he would take some of the remaining tonal mixture off his palette and brush it onto various locations in further watercolours, which were laid out around his studio in a production line. By the time he returned to the first drawing it would have dried. Turner would then slightly darken the given colour on his palette and add the next “note” down the tonal “scale” from light to dark to this work and its successors.
Naturally, such a process saved enormous time, for it did not require the simultaneous creation of a vast range of tones, which would also have required a huge palette and a multitude of brushes, one for each tone. Moreover, as well as permitting the production of large numbers of watercolours, this procedure helped with the reinforcement of spatial depth, for because the finishing touches would always be the darkest tones mixed on a palette, their placement in the foreground of an image would help suggest the maximum degree of recession beyond them. Before too long Turner would enjoy an unrivalled ability to differentiate the most phenomenally minute degrees of light and dark, and eventually he would become the most subtle tonalist in world art.
J. W. Archer, Attic in Turner’s house in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, said to have been Turner’s first studio, 1852, watercolour, The British Museum, London, U. K.
Within a good many watercolours created after the summer of 1792 the ability to create subtle tonal distinctions within an extremely narrow range of tones from light to dark already permitted Turner to project a dazzling radiance of light (for very bright light forces tones into an extremely constricted tonal band). And eventually tonal differentiation would free the artist to move into new realms of colour. Thus many of the very late works reproduced in this book are all flooded with fields of pure colour, within which only slightly lighter or darker variants of the same colour were used to denote the people, objects, landscapes and seascapes existing within those areas. Despite the tonal delicacy with which such forms are depicted, they all seem fully concrete. Increasingly, Turner’s powers as a colourist would become stronger and ever more sophisticated, especially after his first visit to Italy in 1819. By the latter half of his life he would develop into one of the finest and most inventive colourists in European painting. That development began early in life, and initially as a result of seeing Rooker’s Battle Abbey in 1792. Turner always took what he required from other artists, and the Rooker watercolour gave him exactly what he wanted just when he needed it most.
In 1796 the Society of Arts awarded the eighteen-year-old its “Greater Silver Pallet” award for landscape drawing. By now the youth was selling works easily, and he supplemented his income throughout the 1790s by giving private lessons. On winter evenings between 1794 and 1797 he met with various artists – including another leading young watercolourist, Thomas Girtin (1775–1802) – at the home of Dr Thomas Monro. This physician was a consultant to King George III and a doctor specialising in mental illness who would later treat Turner’s mother. (She would subsequently die in his care in 1804.) Monro had established an unofficial artistic “academy” in his house in Adelphi Terrace overlooking the Thames, and he paid Turner two shillings and sixpence per evening plus a supper of oysters to tint copies made in outline by Girtin from works by a number of artists, including Antonio Canaletto (1697–1768), Edward Dayes (1763–1804), Thomas Hearne (1744–1817) and John Robert Cozens (1752–1797), who at the time was a mental patient under the supervision of Dr Monro. Naturally, Turner absorbed the influence of all these painters, and the breadth of Cozens’ landscapes particularly impressed him, as it did Tom Girtin.
Further important artistic influences upon Turner during the 1790s were Thomas Gainsborough RA (1727–1788), Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg RA (1740–1812), Henry Fuseli RA (1741–1825) and Richard Wilson RA (1713?-1782). Gainsborough’s Dutch-inspired landscapes led Turner to a liking for those selfsame types of scenes, while de Loutherbourg especially influenced the way that Turner painted his figures, varying their style according to the type of images in which they appeared. Fuseli’s approach to the human form may occasionally be detected in Turner’s works as well. An appreciation of the pictures of Richard Wilson, who had grafted an Italianate style onto British scenery,
