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Biography
Professional Training and Career
| Travels
| Patrons
| Personal Life
| Reputation
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'The delight I have experienced, during the greater part of my life, from the exercise of
your talent and the pleasure of your society.'
Walter Fawkes to Turner, 1819
Despite Turner's working class background, he seems to have attracted a series of wealthy,
aristocratic patrons, several of whom treated him as a friend and welcomed him into their homes.
In his early twenties, Turner had been taken up by a number of leading collectors.
They supported
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The
Artist and his Admirers,
1827, © Tate, London 2002 |
him by commissioning work and allowing him to study their collections, housed at places
like Stourhead in Wiltshire, the estate of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, a member of a powerful banking family, and the 'gothic'
Fonthill Abbey, also in Wiltshire, built by the fabulously wealthy and eccentric collector, William Beckford.
Important support also came from the slightly less wealthy Walter Fawkes, of Farnley Hall, near Leeds
in Yorkshire, who became a close friend.
In the late 1820s and early 1830s, Turner also became a frequent guest at Petworth in Sussex, home of the third Earl
of Egremont. He gave Turner a studio of his own at the house, where he could work undisturbed, producing oil paintings
of the park and more than a hundred watercolours of the interior of the house and its guests.
Later in his life, many of the patrons who had supported Turner and contributed to his rise to fame had
died (Fawkes in 1825, Egremont in 1837), and by the 1840s he had as many critics as admirers.
His interest in Venice and Switzerland in the 1830s and 40s did converge with the enthusiasms of some of his patrons
and collectors, but his late style, with its energetic brushwork and relative lack of descriptive details, combined with the
uncompromising nature of his modern subject matter, surprised even some of his most devoted patrons.
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