Personal Life

Despite his great fame and lifelong devotion to building a relationship between his art and its public, much of Turner’s personal life was spent cultivating privacy. He never married, although he had close relationships with two women: Sarah Danby, the widow of a well-known musician, and later Sophia Caroline Booth, who was also a widow. One of his closest companions was his father, who lived with Turner for much of the artist’s adult life.

Anecdotes of Turner—some of which were no doubt created for effect, or to enhance the artist’s mythical stature—describe an interesting and unusual figure. His genius was noted by his contemporaries, but many also made specific mention of the artist’s peculiarities. Stories suggest that Turner, unlike many other artists who achieved success, did little to refine his middle-class origins.

He maintained a Cockney accent for his whole life, for example, and contemporary accounts variously describe him as someone who looked more like a sailor, farmer, or laborer than a painter.

Even if he did not dress the part, Turner’s circle of friends included wealthy patrons and notable figures in the Royal Academy. Furthermore, he amassed a significant fortune during his lifetime. Some of this money was supposed to go toward endowing a professorship at the Royal Academy and funding indigent landscape painters, highlighting Turner’s sustained concern for his artistic brothers. Unfortunately, quarrels over his will resulted in the money going to various relations rather than to these ends.

Turner’s need for privacy and quiet solitude (one of his favorite hobbies was fishing) did not cut him off from either the world at large or his artistic contemporaries. He was highly responsive to both cultural, technological, and artistic developments. Paintings such as The Fighting Temeraire—showing the HMS Temeraire being tugged by a steamboat to ultimately be broken up for scrap—poignantly convey a sense of the declining British navy and the rise of new technologies (in this case, steam power).

In his later years, Turner’s desire for privacy grew stronger. He sought out seclusion and his public appearances became increasingly rare. There are stories of London cabs being asked to leave him far from his house, to prevent the drivers from learning either his identity or his address. Still, Turner’s friends spoke well of him, noting his good humor and company. Ruskin, who met Turner in 1840, described him as “a somewhat eccentric, keen-mannered, matter-of-fact, English-minded gentleman: good-natured evidently, bad-tempered evidently, hating humbug of all sorts, shrewd, perhaps a little selfish, highly intellectual; the powers of his mind not brought out with any delight in their manifestation, or intention of display, but flashing out occasionally in a word or a look.” Whatever his peculiarities, Turner’s genius could not be denied, and even in his own day he was rightly recognized as an artist whose talents would be appreciated long after his own time.