( 1775-1851 )

William Turner was born in 1775 in London in a modest English family for which he had always great affection. His father was a barber and was, until his death in 1829, his faithful companion, his mother before sinking into madness and died in an asylum in 1804.

From 1789 to 1793, he was apprenticed at the Royal Academy, and is a student of landscape of Thomas Malton. It will run for wealthy sponsors many copies, and meeting important landscape watercolor.

In 1792 he began his study tours throughout England, Wales and Scotland, painting landscapes and seascapes in watercolor. From the age of 14 years, Turner had become accustomed, he should keep long campaign to go with his notebook sketches, often walking over 40 kilometers per day.

Starting from 1796, Turner exhibit each year in oil paintings at the Royal Academy, mainly historical subjects represented in landscapes and fantastic sublimated, in a style similar to that of painters of the 17th and 18th.

Turner will know very early the success and will enjoy a great reputation, he was elected academician holder at the age of twenty-seven years. Whatever does not stole the duties associated with that status, he will limit the minimum and will also occasionally retreats in secret until the end of his life when his retirement was final since it disappeared under a false identity in Chelsea , District of London on the Thames.

Turner was described by Constable or Delacroix, as a man of neglected, frustrated ways, taciturn and somewhat sociable, solitary. Dedicated to his art, Turner does not build a family. If he had companions in his life, especially Sarah Danby to 1798, he supports her financially and her children, his private life remains unknown.

Peace of Amiens in 1802 allows him to make his first trip on the Continent in France, where he resided in Calais, Paris – here studying the old masters at Louvre - in Savoy, then in Switzerland Piedmont.

In 1804, he created his own gallery to exhibit his works.

In 1807, he began to paint views of the Thames from his own boat. That same year he became a professor of perspective at the Academy and publishes the first part of his "Liber Studiorum" (1807-1819), a series of drawings in pen and wash where it combines precise observation of nature evoke literary and mythological.

Meanwhile, in the years 1807-1810, it is also interested in genre.

Turner almost always assiduously literature and poetry, which were an important place in its inspiration, or Byron quoting Milton frequently in the titles of his works.

VENICE AND THE LIGHT

Tate Gallery, London in 1819, he makes a first trip to Venice, which will mark a turning point in his work, in which the representation of light effects will now take on increasing importance to the detriment of the narrative aspect. ( "San Giorgio Maggiore, in the early morning" - 1819).

His paintings will also involve more vivid colors, especially the warm colors of the spectrum (yellow, red).

In 1826, Turner was on a long journey in France, up the Loire from Nantes to Orleans, performing an extensive series of sketches and watercolors of more than forty towns and sites (An exhibition "Turner, the trip to the Loire" was devoted to this trip in 1997-98, at the Tate Gallery in Blois and Nantes). Twenty-one of these views in the first edition of the "Annual Tour of Turner in 1831.

From this trip started in Calais, it will also draw some beautiful oils, including "Pas-de-Calais" to be submitted to the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1827.

Turner had acquired the habit of using its oil to the increasingly vibrant colors, and the press did not fail to deride its excessive use of "yellow".

TURNER, ROMANTIC PRE-Impressionism

Philadelphia Museum of Art Between the years 1829 and 1837, Turner's work will change even more radical to look less and less to reality figurative, and not keep a bright vision and transformed it .The subject of the work is more representation of the effects of light ( "The fire of Parliament" - 1835).

Forty years before Monet, Turner invented a new painting - which will not be understood by the majority of his contemporaries, who speak of "Follies Turner" - where the artist, away from accepted conventions of genre painting, dissolved forms in the tremor of the atmosphere and light.

In 1833, Turner makes his second trip to Venice, where he will work hard with as "La Dogana, San Giorgio, Zitelle, popular marches of Europe" - 1833. There he will return one last time in 1840.

In 1837 he published "The rivers of France", which includes its views of the Seine and the Loire.

TURNER DEFENDED BY RUSKIN

In June 1840, Turner had knowledge of the young and rich John Ruskin (art critic and sociologist, 1819 - 1900), who would become his most ardent admirer, supporter and collector.

In 1843, Ruskin binding on the English scene with the publication of the first volume of Modern Painters where he gives a eulogy of the work of Turner.

In 1844, Turner explains "Rain, Steam and Speed, the railway of the Great Western" at the Royal Academy, a work that will interest by its Impressionist and modern subject.

In 1845, he made his last visit to France.

RETIREMENT Solitaire CHELSEA

In 1846 he left his house in Queen Anne Street, built in 1812, he broke relations with the world, changed name and moved into a poor house in Chelsea, on the other side of Westminster. He spent the last years of his life in solitude, unaffordable, unknown even to the hotel that he lived.

In 1847, with the legacy of works by contemporary painters Robert Vernon at the National Gallery, first enters an oil Turner in the British national collection.

In 1850, Turner exhibited at the Royal Academy 4 of his last works in the manner of Claude Lorrain.

THE LEGS TURNER

National Gallery, London Turner died in December 19 at Chelsea in 1851, shortly after being found, and he was buried in the Cathedral of St. Paul. He bequeathed his paintings to the nation and 200 000 pounds sterling for the construction of a haven for poor artists.

In 1857, the exhibition "Art Treasures" present 24 oils and 83 watercolors by Turner.

In 1857-58, Ruskin is allowed to select watercolors and drawings from the Turner request for a public presentation at Marlborough House, where 400 will be framed.