For about 60 years Joseph Mallord William Turner lived all daylight hours with brush and pencil in hand. He executed 25.000 works, including drawings, engravings, watercolours. When he died in 1851 he left £140 in securities, houses in London and a collection of his own works, a real estate. Today his works are worth from thousands to millions of euros.
Turner was an English painter who loved money and haggled like a junk dealer, but created wonderful works of art, stormy seas with a light equal to that of God.
It was 1775, in a poor and dark house, she was born Joseph Mallord William Turner, English painter son of a barber and a woman who soon died in an asylum.
As a child, did you love to draw all the walls of the house and even the streets with chalk, as if he were a precursor of Street Art? At the age of twelve he was making illustrations that his father sold in his shop, offering them for a few shillings to customers who came to have their hair and beard cut. At fourteen she entered the painting school of the Royal Academy and in just a year of teaching she became among her finest pupils. In those years, as photography was not yet born, the drawings were much sought after and therefore Turner found many patrons and buyers for his works. And since his drawings are particularly sharp, they lend themselves to being reproduced in etchings to illustrate books.
The architects called him to reproduce their homes, and for one of these, he created a painting that instead of having gray windows, as was the custom at the time, the young man made them light yellow and reproduced underlying shadows, as illuminated by the sun. It was proof of Turner's great ability to exalt the light that will characterize all of his work. he soon found work, copying paintings by artists who lived previously and charged well for them, because it seems that he was very attached to money, as well as painting. There wasn't a living room in England at that time that didn't have a Turner on the wall, whether it was an engraving or an oil work. He worked day and night, he was even paid hours to copy paintings or taught the art of engraving to young nobles. His private life was not the best, we only know that he fell in love with a girl, but that her mother did everything to get her daughter to marry another, and so it was. Turner didn't have a nice physique, on the contrary, of small stature and with a hooked nose and receding chin, in short, a bit insignificant and not all that rich. Turner was forever saddened by the choice of his beloved, that he no longer thought of marriage. At 21, his first oil painting, Fishermen at Sea, at the Royal Academy. He became an academic at just 27 and at 35 he was rivaled by Constable's prestige, but nonetheless was judged to be the finest English landscape painter of the time.
Turner possessed a great personal gift, a great visual memory, to the point that one day while observing a storm, he exclaimed "It's wonderful!”. After a few years she reproduced the same scene in a painting, she hadn't forgotten anything. But what fascinated him most were always the ships and the sea. His early works were perfect representations of the Thames with the boats that sailed along it., In one way or another. One of his finest works"Fighting Temeraire” was none other than the old vessel that had fought at Trafalgar and towed up the Thames to Deptfort to be scrapped. As the years went by, the need to make the paintings more and more clearer than in the past matured in him, more and more light had to shine through to make the image more real. The drama of the moment, like a storm at sea, was to appear with billowing clouds, a tumultuous sea and foaming waves crashing against the vessels, with sails almost entering the water.
As an English critic, William Hazlitt said: «Turner painted chaos as it was before God parted the waters and created man». But not all of his work was accepted by the critics, someone said about him about the work "Snow Storm", it looks like a "lime soap". The statement infuriated Turner, who had lived and seen that scene with his eyes and replied «I wish it had been him». Although grumpy and surly, he was generous with friends and even more with painters. It is said that one day there was an exhibition and two paintings by him were placed next to a large painting by Thomas Lawrence. Turner realized that his friend's work, albeit large, disfigured in front of the beauty of the other two, so one night he decided to pass a brown veil over his paintings to remove that light that enchanted me. And to his friend he said "I thought carbon black looked good on it”. He was also an excellent merchant, one day the Marquis of Stafford paid him 250 guineas for his Fishing Boats, but Turner, not happy, continued to bombard him with letters, specifying to the Marquis that he had only bought the frame and to send him the money for the canvas. His paintings were his children, and even if he sold them then he sought them out and bought them back, often buying them at a much higher price than he had sold them.
Today Turner's works are in the largest collections and museums in the world, his sea is indescribable and full of emotions. Its market values range from thousands to several million euros, depending on the work and technique, as well as the uniqueness or provenance of the work in question. Here are some of the latest awards:
Clearing price: €1.213.554 (£1.100.000) Price including charges: €1.472.813 (£1.335.000) Estimate: €1.103.230 – €1.654.846 (£1.000.000 – £1.500.000) Sotheby's 28/07/2020
Clearing price: €7.803.949 (£7.000.000) Price including charges: €9.109.438 (£8.171.000) Estimate: €4.459.399 – €6.689.099 (£4.000.000 – £6.000.000)Sotheby's 03/07/2019
Clearing price: €3.173.032 (£2.800.000) Price including charges: €3.818.970 (£3.370.000) Estimate: €3.399.677 – €5.666.128 (£3.000.000 – £5.000.000) Sotheby's 04/07/2018
