J. M. W. Turner

Turner's father, William Turner, was born at South Molton in Devonshire , on June 29, 1745. It is not known where he served his apprenticeship as a barber and perruquier, where he first practiced on his own account, or when he came to London . The earliest record of his presence there is found in an entry in the Registry of the Diocese of London which states that William Turner, a bachelor aged twenty-eight years, appeared in person before Dr. A. C. Ducarel, the Surrogate, on August 27, 1773, and applied for a license to marry Mary Marshall, a spinster aged thirty-four years, of the Parish of St. Paul, Covent Garden, and that he made oath that his usual place of abode had been in the same parish 'for the space of four weeks last past'.

J. M. W. Turner was sent to Brentford, we are told, 'in consequence of a fit of illness'; the illness, it has been assumed, was J. M. W. Turner's ('want of air -chief disease in London!' according to Thornbury), but it was more probably his sister's fatal illness that was the immediate cause of his being sent away from home. After his sister's death, however, his parents may have thought it advisable for him to remain where the air was more salubrious than in the neighborhood of Covent Garden .

The earliest dated drawing of unquestionable authenticity known to us is a copy, made when he was twelve years of age, of an engraving of the ' North-west View of Friar Bacon's Study and Folly Bridge , Oxford ', which had been published in the Oxford Almanack for 1780. This copy is signed and dated ' W. Turner, 1787'. It was in his possession at his death and is now included in what is known as the Drawings of the J. M. W. Turner Bequest.

There is no reason to suppose that J. M. W. Turner was cut off from all intercourse with his parents during the years he spent at Brentford. He probably visited them in the holidays even if he did not spend all his vacations with them. His early drawings, we are told, were hung round the entrance to his father's shop, 'ticketed at prices varying from one shilling to three'. And a Mr. Duroveray showed Mr. Alaric Watts one of these drawings 'which had been given to him by a friend, who had purchased it from the hairdresser's window'. Mr. Watts described the drawing as 'either a copy or an imitation of Paul Sandby, signed W. Turner', a description that might very well be given of the other early drawings in the J. M. W. Turner Bequest. I think, therefore, that we may accept them as samples of the drawings that were exposed for sale in his father's shop 'at prices varying from one shilling to three'. The date on two of them would indicate that J. M. W. Turner's father adopted this method of bringing his son's drawings to the notice of his customers while the boy was still at school.

The ' Oxford ' sketch-book, which seems to mark the beginnings of J. M. W. Turner's professional career, suggests that the father's decision had been made by 1789. The incident referred to by Mr. Lovell Reeve, when the barber announced to Stothard, whose hair he was cutting, 'My son is going to be a painter', probably took place early in that year; it is difficult to suppose that it could have been much earlier.

J. M. W. Turner made two sketching tours in the summer of 1795, one in South Wales, the other in the Isle of Wight . When the drawings of the J. M. W. Turner Bequest were being arranged, it was assumed that he went to the Isle of Wight first; I now favor the suggestion that he went to South Wales, probably in June, and returned to London about the middle or towards the end of July; and that in August or September he went to the Isle of Wight.

In the three previous years J. M. W. Turner's traveling sketches had nearly all been made on separate sheets of paper, and a certain number were given away or sold in his lifetime. So far as I know he did not part with any of the sketches made in 1795, and they are all comprised in three sketchbooks which are now in the J. M. W. Turner Bequest.