Joseph Mallord William Turner (Covent Garden, London, 23 April 1775 – Chelsea, London, 19 December 1851) was an English painter and artist. He was one of the greatest artists of landscape painting, with a great mastery of light and colour.
His father was a maker of wigs. His mother was ill with mental problems, and the young Turner was sent to live with his uncle in Brentford, West London, where he first started to paint.
Turner became a student at the Royal Academy of Art school in London when he was 14 years old. He was accepted into the academy a year later. He had a watercolour painting in 1790 in the academy’s important art show. He had only been studying for a year. In 1802, at the age of only 28, he was elected a member of the Royal Academy, and later became its Professor of Perspective.
In 1802, Turner travelled around Europe, visiting France and Switzerland. He also went to the Louvre in Paris. During his life, he often travelled across Europe, visiting Venice in Italy several times. As his personal style developed, he began to produce paintings that were generalised or exaggerated in form and colour, rather than realistic or detailed. These caused much argument as to their artistic value, but nowadays are his best loved works. On his death, he left 300 oils and 20,000 watercolours to the British nation. Some of his watercolours are the most abstract or generalised of his paintings.
Turner never married, although he had two children with his mistress Sarah Danby. For much of his life, he lived with his father, who helped him in his studio until he died in 1829.
In his early career, Turner was influenced by the painters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, who painted “historical” landscapes.
Turner became interested in natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea. His paintings revolve around the light of the sun, shown in infinite variety. His work showed some of the ideas of the impressionists decades before they arrived on the scene. Monet, in particular, studied Turner’s methods.
His most famous paintings include The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up. Often called just The Fighting Temeraire, this is a picture of a famous warship that was used in the Battle of Trafalgar. Other pictures include Rain, Steam and Speed, which shows a steam train crossing a bridge, and Snowstorm which shows a steamship in a snowstorm trying to get into a harbour. In order to get the right feeling into this painting, he had himself tied to a ship’s mast during a storm, so that he could see what it was like. Some of his most famous paintings show the roughness of nature, with bleak landscapes and violent storms.
But also there is beauty and a sense of calmness in pictures such as Crossing the Brook, a stunning scenic view of the Tamar Valley and River from New Bridge near Gunnislake in Cornwall, painted in 1815, a view which can still be admired today.
As he grew older, Turner’s behaviour became a bit odd, and he became depressed quite often. He died in Chelsea on 19 September 1851, and was buried next to the painter Joshua Reynolds in St Paul’s Cathedral.
Even while Turner was alive, some people thought he was a genius. Some people complained that the pictures he painted when he was older were not realistic, and some even joked that they could have been painted with a mop. However, most think that his way of painting shows complete mastery.
Turner developed this painting of the Tamar valley from sketches he made in Devon in 1811 and 1813. His watercolours and drawings of the area were fresh and informal. Here he creates a more self-consciously artful image. This was meant to evoke the 17th-century classical landscapes of French painter Claude Lorrain. The painting was exhibited in the year of the battle of Waterloo. Viewers at the time would have been alert to the patriotic subtext of such an imposing depiction of the British landscape.
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‘What you have to remember is that these paintings in the 18th and 19th century are before photography and they provide an invaluable insight in to the history of the valley. The scenes these artists sketched and painted and the topography of the river and the valley is not exactly like it is today. Nowadays the river has all been banked up and straightened out and there are no longer many coves and inlets.
‘In the 18th and 19th centuries artists were seeking out the romantic and picturesque to paint, and the Tamar Valley soon became a favourite place to visit. The river, with its rocky crags and woods, was visited by the famous Joseph Turner in 1813, and he made numerous sketches around Gunnislake, and indeed painted a major oil painting using some of the basic topographical features around Newbridge.
‘There was a romantic movement flourishing at the end of the 18th century where paintings have very romanticised landscapes. These helped to make the Tamar Valley at the time popular with tourists.’
Other artists were also attracted by winding river and lush vegetation — Philip Mitchell (1814-1896) was born in Devonport but lived and painted in Cornwall. He was active in the 1860s and painted two large exhibition standard watercolours of Gunnislake Lock and Canal, from north and south.
https://www.okehampton-today.co.uk/news/kates-artistic-eye-for-the-tamar-valley-413947
