1818 Visits Edinburgh.

      1819 Walter Fawkes exhibits over sixty Turner watercolours in his London residence. Pays first visit to Italy, stays in Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples.

      1821 Visits Paris and tours northern France.

      1822 Visits Edinburgh for State Visit of King George IV.

      1824 Tours south-east England, also the Meuse and Moselle rivers.

      1825 Tours Holland, Germany and Belgium. Death of Walter Fawkes.

      1826 Tours Germany, Brittany and the Loire.

      1827 Stays at East Cowes castle, the home of the architect John Nash. Autumn, starts visiting Petworth regularly.

      1828 Delivers last lectures as Royal Academy Professor of Perspective. Visits Italy a second time, stays principally in Rome.

      1829 Exhibits seventy-nine ‘England and Wales’ series watercolours in London. Visits Paris, Normandy and Brittany. Death of father. Draws up first draft of will.

      1830 Tours Midlands. Exhibits a watercolour for the last time at the Royal Academy.

      1831 Tours Scotland. Revises will.

      1832 Visits Paris, probably meets Delacroix.

      1833 Exhibits 66 ‘England and Wales’ watercolours in London. Visits Vienna and Venice.

      1835 Tours Denmark, Prussia, Saxony, Bohemia, the Rhineland and Holland.

      1836 Tours France, Switzerland and the Val d’Aosta.

      1837 Death of Lord Egremont. Resigns as Royal Academy Professor of Perspective.

      1839 Tours the Meuse and Moselle rivers.

      1840 Meets John Ruskin for the first time. Visits Venice.

      1841 Tours Switzerland, and does so again in following three summers.

      1845 Acts as temporary President of Royal Academy. Tours northern France in May; in the autumn Dieppe and Picardy, his last tour.

      1846 Moves to Chelsea around this time.

      1848–49 Growing infirmity. Revises will.

      1850 Exhibits for the last time at the Royal Academy.

      1851 Dies 19 December in Chelsea, London.

      From darkness to light: perhaps no painter in the history of western art evolved over a greater visual span than Turner. If we compare one of his earliest exhibited masterworks, such as the fairly low-key St Anselm’s Chapel, with part of Thomas-à-Becket’s crown, Canterbury Cathedral of 1794, with a vividly bright picture dating from the 1840s, such as The Falls of the Clyde, it seems hard to credit that the two images stemmed from the same hand, so vastly do they differ in appearance. Yet this apparent disjunction can easily obscure the profound continuity that underpins Turner’s art, just as the dazzling colour, high tonality and loose forms of the late images can lead to the belief that the painter shared the aims of the French Impressionists or even that he wanted to be some kind of abstractionist, both of which notions are untrue.

      Folly Bridge and Bacon’s Tower, Oxford

      1787

      pen and ink with watercolour, 30.8 × 43.2 cm

      Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London

      The work is a transcription of an image made for The Oxford

      Almanack by Michael Angelo Rooker

      Instead, that continuity demonstrates how single-mindedly Turner pursued his early goals, and how magnificently he finally attained them. To trace those aims and their achievement by means of a selected number of works, as well as briefly to recount the artist’s life, is the underlying purpose of this book.

      Joseph Mallord William Turner was born at 21 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, sometime in late April or early May 1775. (The artist himself liked to claim that he was born on 23 April which is both our national day, St George’s Day, and William Shakespeare’s birthday, although no verification of that claim has ever been found.) His father, William, was a wig-maker who had taken to cutting hair after wigs began to go out of fashion in the 1770s.

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