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The second birth of JMW Turner

This year marks the 250th anniversary of his birth, but it was a midlife encounter with two landscapes that created the painter as we know him.

Here was a man who travelled everywhere with a carpet-bag he kept locked and never vouchsafed its contents; whose sketching kit included not just watercolour paints and paper but an umbrella with a dagger concealed in its handle in case of footpads; an artist who tried always to paint with the door locked and who, if observed, would cover up his picture until the prying eyes moved on; a man who numbered the pioneering scientists Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday among his friends but who failed to impress the younger French romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, who thought “he looked like an English farmer, with a black coat of coarse stuff, thick-soled shoes, and a cold, hard expression”. When his doctor gave him his prognosis, the artist responded: “So, I am to become a nonentity, am I?” He himself, after a lifetime of unshakeable self-belief, knew this wasn’t the case and with the scandal of his living – and dying – arrangements averted, he received a funeral befitting his status at St Paul’s Cathedral. The story behind his Snow Storm(1842) – that he was tied to the mast of a steamship to observe a blizzard at sea – is almost certainly apocryphal but he did have himself rowed to the centre of the Thames to make documentary sketches of pyromaniacal excitement as the Houses of Parliament were consumed by flames in 1834.

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