J. M. W. Turner

CHAPTER ONE 1775-1799 Joseph Mallord William Turner was a child of London. His father owned a barber's shop in Maiden Lane, off Covent Garden, having migrated to the city from a small town in Devon. His mother came from a line of London butchers. Turner himself appeared to all who knew him to be a quintessential citizen--short and stocky, energetic and pugnacious. His speech was recognizably that of a Cockney, and his language was the language of the streets. He had another direct inheritance. His father was short, also, and his famous son was said to resemble him. According to a family friend William Turner was "spare and muscular, with small blue eyes, parrot nose, projecting chin, fresh complexion." His son boasted, if that is the word, the same nose and chin. The friend added that William Turner "was more cheerful than his son, and had always a smile on his face." His happy disposition no doubt assisted in the success of his barber's shop, where the most important duty was to please the customer, and in any case he seems to have been a proficient businessman. He passed on his economical habits to his son. "Dad never praised me," Turner once said, "except for saving a shilling." It was a lesson he recalled for the rest of his life. Mary Turner was a considerably more difficult character. She was prone to fits of violent temper, and in the end her rages became so uncontrollable that she was eventually consigned to an asylum. A lost portrait of her suggested "a strong likeness to Turner about the nose and eyes . . . she stands erect, and looks masculine, not to say fierce." Turner seems to have inherited something of his mother's temper, but it never passed beyond the boundaries of sanity. His parents had married at Inigo Jones's church of St. Paul's in Covent Garden in the summer of 1773 by means of a "special licence," which suggests haste or circumspection. Two years later their first-born son entered the world by way of the family house at 21 Maiden Lane. The infant was baptised at the same church in Covent Garden, with his trinity of Christian names apparently being taken from his maternal grandfather and great-grandfather. Joseph Mallord William Turner's date of birth, 23 April 1775--otherwise known as St. George's Day--was shared with Shakespeare's traditional birthday. There was another omen. Four days after his birth, a phenomenon of "three suns" was observed in the afternoon sky--a fitting prelude to the career of an artist who is supposed to have declared on his death-bed that "the sun is god." It was a busy, and noisy, household. William Turner's shop was on the ground floor, where he could be seen busily lathering the genteel with his soft badger brush, and the basement next door was occupied by a cider cellar described euphemistically as a "midnight concert room." It is an interesting coincidence that 21 Maiden Lane had been used as an exhibition room by the Free Society of Artists, and then later as a school by the Incorporated Society of Artists of Great Britain. London is full of such fortuitous associations. At a later date the Turners crossed the road to 26 Maiden Lane, where they lived on the north side. The sun would in any case have scarcely penetrated this narrow thoroughfare in the heart of what was even then known as the "West End." It was a fashionable area filled with actors and painters and prostitutes. Covent Garden itself was notorious for its bagnios and brothels--it was called by one contemporary "the great square of Venus"--and in their vicinity there were of course many taverns and gaming houses as well as expeditious thieves and pickpockets. If you wished for a quick education in the ways of the London streets, then Turner's neighbourhood was the place to come. It has often been observed that in Turner's sketches theAckroyd, Peter is the author of 'J. M. W. Turner ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780385507981 and ISBN 0385507984.