Joseph Mallord William Turner

Born in London, Turner entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1789. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1790, first in watercolours, afterwards in oils. Between c.1794 and 1797, Turner worked for Dr.Thomas Monro (1759-1833), a connoisseur and amateur artist who encouraged young artists to copy from his large collection of drawings, which included works by Gainsborough, J.R.Cozens, Thomas Hearne and Paul Sandby.

Farington records in his diary that Turner earned three shillings and sixpence a night, and his supper. Turner later developed an interest in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings and the Italianate pictures of Claude and Richard Wilson, as well as a fascination with contemporary technological developments with steam and speed. John Ruskin was a major champion of his work, in which he saw, "the most subtle qualities of natural beauty in form and atmosphere" and "his mind fixed chiefly on the loveliness of material things; morally, on the passing away of human life, as a cloud, from the midst of them".