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The Life of an Artist
Turner's Work: An Overview
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Turner gave a great deal of thought to his own legacy. After the passing of his father in 1829 he immediately drew up the first draft of his own will. He would come to make many revisions of the will over the years. At times he bequeathed a portion of his wealth to his children, relatives and unmarried partners, Sarah Danby (1760-1861) and Sophia Booth (1798-1875); at other times he seemed disinclined to do so. In his final will he bequeathed a sizable donation of property and money for the founding of an almshouse for 'poor and decayed male artists'. This provision was challenged in court by his relatives who sued for the money and thus it never came to pass.
The most important question he always returned to regarded the fate of his work after his death. He was concerned (obsesssed?) that his legacy live on in the afterlife, once he was safely entombed in St. Paul's Cathedral. He desired that his work remain together and be available for exhibition. When Turner passed away in 1851, he made a bequest of his work to the nation of Britain. Almost immediately questions arose about whether he had intended to bequeath all his work (including unfinshed sketches, notebooks, etc.) or only his major oils and watercolors. It took several years of legal wrangling over the will, as relatives presented challenges, and details were ironed out. Ultimately, it was decided that the entire contents of his gallery would be included in the Turner Bequest to the Nation, which finally went through in 1856.
Today, the bulk of the Bequest (some 300 oil paintings and 30,000 sketches and watercolors) are housed in the Tate's Clore Gallery. The main dataset for this project contains a portion (a little over 4,000 works) that were acquired by the nation via the Bequest. Additionally, a small percentage of works were obtained over the years by other means. Peruse the visualization below for more information about the method of acquistion for the works comprising the dataset.
In 2012-2013, the Royal Academy of Arts in London held an exhibition called Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape. These three artists (and RA members) helped elevate the form of landscape art to one of great renown for British artists. It is impossible to say with certainty what their legacy is but would using a modern text analysis tool be able to give us some information about how there impact has waxed (or waned) in culture. Google Ngram offers a way to chart the usage of a word or phrase from their Google Books corpus. Below are two charts obtained from Google Ngrams, from 1700-2008 for the three artists.
The first chart uses the full names of the artists (ex. J.M.W. Turner being the most common version of his full name.) and the second just uses the last names (ex. Turner.) With the first chart we can say with a fairly high degree of certainty that the instances of usage of these names does indeed refere to the specific artist. With the second chart there is less certainty that the usage being tracked refers specifically to the artists. We can say with certainty, for example, that the usage of the word 'constable' through the first three quarters of the 18th century did not refer to 'John Constable' as the artist was not born until 1776. In this case the word 'constable' was most likely being employed in the fairly common British usage meaning an officer of the peace.
It seems a bit curious that the usages of the name 'J.M.W. Turner' lags so far behind 'John Constable' and 'Thomas Gainsborough'. One possible interpretation is that, in fact, Mr. Turner was so well known that people generally don't refer to him by his whole name but instead just refer to him by the abbreviated 'Turner' whereas this may not be the case with 'Gainsborough' and 'Constable' who's referrants would need to be clarified by usage of their full names. While this is indeed speculation, there may be some confirmation of this if we examine how the use of 'Turner' rises in falls at times in lockstep with the usage of the other two artists full names. Look, for example, at dip and sharp spike and then dip again, that looks almost identical between those three between 1900-1920. If this is in fact the caes then we would actually interpret that his name has had a recent rise in usage. Of course, we would have to consider that others (ex. Tina Turner, Ted Turner, etc.) might be referred to as well. In any case, with a recent movie about Turner and with his soon-to-be immortalization on the 20 pound note, it would seem that their can not really be too much doubt that he still holds a pretty large place in the world's (or at least the British nation's) consciousness.