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Turner on Tour
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Above we find a 'word cloud' representing the most commonly used words found in the title's of Turner's works taken from the Tate dataset. Words occurring more frequently appear larger. Some of the most common words like 'sea', 'river', 'castle' and 'lake' should come as no suprise to those familiar with his many landscapes. Some like 'study' may be more surprising, but result from the fact that a large number of the works appearing in the dataset are not finished works meant for display but were instead sketches and studies. The most common subject of his studies is the sky with 76 unique works referred to as 'Study of Sky'.
Looking below we find a chart representing the number of works Turner exhibited each year at the Royal Academy over the course of his career. The Royal Academy of Arts was established in London in 1768 as a means of promoting the growth of British art through education and exhibition. Becoming a member involved the demonstration of both superb artistic skill as well as political acumen; membership involved being elected in by the current members.
Turner demonstrated prodigious talent and hard work from a young age. After training as student at the RA schools from the age of 14 and then becoming an associate Academician at the age of 24, Turner would be voted in as the youngest ever full Royal Academy member in 1802 a few months shy of 27. He would remain closely involved with the RA and its activities througout his life.
The tree map below presents a visual representation of the year's that Turner was most active. The size of each year corresponds to the number of works from that year that are present in the dataset. Although the 1830's were without question one of Turner's most prolific decades there appears to be curious outlier with the year 1830 containing twice as many works as its nearest year. After looking up a number of items from the year 1830 on the Tate website it became clear that a certain number of sketches with unknown exact dates of origin c. 1826-1840 were entered into dataset as having the date 1830.