JMW Turner: Rise to Fame

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Self-Portrait  c.1799

Turner painted this self-portrait in around 1799 when he was 24 years old. He possibly intended to mark his election as an Associate of the Royal Academy. This was an important moment in his career. It meant he could exhibit his works in the Academy without fear of rejection by any members of the committee. Despite his young age, Turner had already made a name for himself as an original, accomplished painter with great technical skill. This self-portrait features on the £20 note issued by the Bank of England in March 2020.

Gallery label, July 2020

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Aeneas and the Sibyl, Lake Avernus  c.1798

This work is probably Turner’s first attempt at an oil painting of a mythological subject, set in a ‘classical’ landscape. This is a stylised background, painted to evoke the landscape of ancient Greece or Rome. The story comes from the Aeneid, by the Roman poet Virgil. The Trojan military leader Aeneas wants to visit the Underworld in order to consult the ghost of his father. He meets the Cumaean Sibyl (a priestess at Cumae, a Greek colony near Naples, Italy). She agrees to guide him through the kingdom of the dead. The deep lake, surrounded by dark woods, was believed to lead to the Underworld. Turner based the Italian setting of this painting, with its view of Lake Avernus, on a drawing by his patron, Sir Richard Colt Hoare.

Gallery label, July 2020

Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Destruction of Sodom  ? exhibited 1805

Turner was thirty when he painted this ambitious historical landscape

. It shows his admiration for the grand art of the seventeenth-century painter, Nicolas Poussin, which he had studied in the Louvre during his visit to Paris in 1802.

The subject is from the Book of Genesis. It shows Lot and his two daughters (to the right) fleeing the city of Sodom as 'the Lord rained brimstone and fire' in divine retribution for the sins of its citizens. Lot's wife (on the right of the group) is being turned into a pillar of salt as she turns to look back.

Gallery label, February 2010

Joseph Mallord William Turner, London from Greenwich Park  exhibited 1809

London was the largest, busiest city in the world at the time Turner painted this picture. He exhibited it in 1809, accompanied by his own poetry, which described a hectic, oppressive city – a ‘world of care’ beneath a ‘murky veil’ of cloud, relieved only by the ‘gleams of hope’ offered by its architecture. In Turner’s painting, Greenwich Hospital is framed by the surrounding trees, while the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral towers above the distant city.

Gallery label, November 2022

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Ploughing Up Turnips, near Slough (‘Windsor’)  exhibited 1809

King George III was nicknamed ‘Farmer George’ owing to the special interest he took in agricultural matters. During his reign, mass land enclosures ushered in modern, capitalistic farming. Turnips were an indication of these changes, as they are a crop which can only be grown effectively in a rotation system. Here, turnips are being ploughed in the shadow of Windsor Castle. The workers are not the cheerful and industrious labourers seen in many landscape paintings, suggesting that Turner wished to highlight the plight of those who had found themselves dispossessed by the new farming practices.

Gallery label, November 2022

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps  exhibited 1812

Many of Turner’s peers saw the Napoleonic Wars as existential clashes between empires, comparing them to the ancient Trojan and Punic wars. France and Britain debated which was the modern Carthage or Rome. French artists portrayed Napoleon as a modern Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who led his army across the Alps into Italy in 218 BCE. Turner shows him as a tiny figure riding an elephant. He is overwhelmed by a whirling blizzard as mountain-dwellers attack his troops. Turner’s picture became prophetic later in 1812, when Napoleon was forced to retreat from Moscow by the Russian winter.

Gallery label, November 2022

Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Deluge  ?exhibited 1805

The Bible was a prime source of subjects that were both sensational and intellectually elevated. A critic commenting on this painting of the Biblical flood admired ‘that severity of manner which was demanded by the awfulness of the subject’. Turner does seem to be referring to the ‘severe’ style of the 17th-century French artist Nicolas Poussin. He also connected the picture to the poetry of John Milton, the most severely Sublime of poets.

Turner became an important model for younger artists of the apocalyptic Sublime, notably John Martin and Francis Danby (on display in room 14).

Gallery label, September 2004

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Dido and Aeneas  exhibited 1814

This story comes from Virgil’s Latin poem The Aeneid. Aeneas was a Prince who fled Troy at the end of the Trojan War and was shipwrecked in Carthage, on the coast of North Africa. Here he fell in love with the Queen, Dido. Although he been told it was his destiny to become the founder of Rome, his love for Dido made him delay his final journey to Italy.

Here Turner shows the blossoming of their love, as they set out to go hunting in the woods. When Aeneas finally left Carthage the heartbroken Dido killed herself.

Gallery label, February 2004

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Crossing the Brook  exhibited 1815

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.

Gallery label, July 2020

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Fishermen at Sea  exhibited 1796

The first oil painting Turner exhibited at the Royal Academy, this is a moonlit scene in the tradition of Horace Vernet, Philip de Loutherbourg and Joseph Wright of Derby. These painters were largely responsible for fuelling the 18th-century vogue for nocturnal subjects. The sense of the overwhelming power of nature is a key theme of the Sublime. The potency of the moonlight contrasts with the delicate vulnerability of the flickering lantern, emphasising nature’s power over mankind and the fishermen’s fate in particular. The jagged silhouettes on the left are the treacherous rocks called ‘the Needles’ off the Isle of Wight.

Gallery label, July 2010