Turner and the Royal Academy: From Student at 14 to Professor

Entry and early election

He was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in December 1789, aged fourteen, and first exhibited there the following year with a watercolour. He was elected an Associate in November 1799, at twenty-four, which was the earliest age the regulations allowed, and became a full Academician in February 1802 at twenty-six.

That pace was quite exceptional for a landscape painter. The Academy's own hierarchy placed landscape below history painting and below portraiture, so a young man arriving at full membership that quickly in the lower genre was a signal both of his ability and of how hard he had worked the institution.

Professor of Perspective

The Academy appointed him Professor of Perspective in 1807, and he delivered his first course of lectures in January 1811. He held the chair for roughly thirty years before resigning in 1837, though he lectured irregularly and in several years not at all, which the Council tolerated with visible patience.

Accounts of the lectures are unanimous and unkind. He read badly, mumbled, lost his place, and left sentences unfinished, and audiences thinned as each course went on. What survives in his notes, however, is a serious attempt to systematise how pictorial space is constructed, illustrated with elaborate diagrams he drew himself.

The varnishing days

Exhibitors were given several days to varnish and adjust pictures after the hanging was decided, and Turner used them famously. He would arrive with a canvas barely worked, paint it towards completion on the wall in front of colleagues, and tune it against whatever had ended up hanging next to it.

The practice had a tactical logic beyond the showmanship. A painting finished in place could be adjusted to the light it had actually been allotted and to the colour of its neighbours, which mattered a great deal in rooms hung frame to frame from floor to ceiling in the manner of the period.

Service and office

He served on the Council, sat on hanging committees, acted as Deputy President in the mid-1840s when Sir Martin Archer Shee was ill, and attended dinners for decades. For a man described by everyone who met him as private and taciturn, the volume of committee work is a striking thing to find in the record.

The Academy moved twice

The institution Turner served was not in one place. He entered it at Somerset House, saw it move to Trafalgar Square in 1837 to share a building with the new National Gallery, and did not live to see the move to Burlington House. His working life spans two of the Academy's three homes.

What he left it

Turner's will remembered the Academy with money for a medal for landscape painting and for a dinner on his birthday. The intention is consistent with everything else: he wanted landscape recognised as a serious pursuit by the body that had ranked it low, and he was willing to endow the recognition himself.