Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in London, the son of a barber. His formal education was limited, but he showed a precocious artistic talent, displaying his drawings in the window of his father’s shop, and exhibiting his first watercolour at the Royal Academy at the age of 15. A year later he began making sketching tours to various parts of Britain, producing drawings of picturesque views and architectural subjects that were later sold to engravers or used as the basis of watercolours. He quickly achieved critical and financial success, and was elected to full membership of the Royal Academy in 1802, at the unusually young age of 26.

In the same year he made the first of many trips to the Continent. Unlike his great contemporary Constable, who concentrated on painting the places he knew best, Turner was more inspired by the scenes he saw on his travels. The mountains and lakes of Switzerland and the lagoons and crumbling palaces of Venice were favourite subjects.

From the 1830s his art became increasingly personal and free, with detail frequently lost in general effects of colour and light. Some contemporary critics found it incomprehensible, and one of his most famous pictures, Snow Storm: Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (Tate, 1842), was dismissed as ‘soapsuds and whitewash’. But Turner’s wealth and prestige allowed him to ignore such attacks, and he retained a loyal band of admirers and patrons. George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont, even gave him his own studio at Petworth, his Sussex country house. John Ruskin, his great literary champion, admired the way he harnessed the power and beauty of nature to express human concerns.

Turner was a prominent figure in the London art world. He was Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy, and was acting President in 1845-6. His virtuoso performances at the varnishing days of the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition were legendary; he transformed unfinished paintings ‘like chaos before the creation’ into glowing finished works. But his personal life remained very private, and he became increasingly reclusive with old age. He never married, but had two long-term relationships with widows and is rumoured to have fathered several children.

After Turner's death, all the works remaining in his possession – about 300 oils and 19,000 drawings and watercolours – were given to the National Gallery. Most of these are now in the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain, but a few of Turner’s most famous oils remain at the National Gallery.

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