'His short figure had become corpulent - his face . was unusually red, and a little inclined to blotches, . He generally wore what is called a black dress-coat, which would have been the better for brushing - the sleeves were mostly too long, coming down over his fat and not over-clean hands.'
- Richard Redgrave, 1830s
Turner was born on the 23 April 1775, in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, in London, the son of a barber. From these working class beginnings he achieved great wealth, though in old age he lived in some squalor. He cultivated anonymity and tried his best to cloak his personal life in mystery; in his last years he tried to conceal his address, and lived under an assumed name.
The Tate's portrait of Turner at the age of twenty-four is the only self-portrait in existence; he disliked his own appearance and discouraged others from attempting to record it. His obsession with privacy and his unwillingness to marry and form a conventional family, has been linked to the mental illness of his mother. She was admitted to Bethlehem Hospital ('Bedlam') in 1800 when Turner was twenty-five, and died there four years later.
Turner first saw the sea in his early teens, when he was sent to Margate to stay with relatives of his mother. In his later years he again became a regular visitor to Margate, staying in a house overlooking the beach. His landlady, Mrs Booth, became his mistress.
Turner never married but he did have two children by Sarah Danby. Turner's health began to fail in 1845, when he was seventy, although he lived until the age of seventy-six, and died and his home in Chelsea.
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