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BIOGRAPHY James Alfred Turner - Page 1 of 3

Died:  13 April 1908, Faversham Road, Canterbury,

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

JAMES ALFRED TURNER, artist, was born on 11 February 1850 at

Bradford, Yorkshire, England, son of John Turner, bank accountant,

and his wife Rhoda, née Oddy.   He arrived in Victoria some time

before 1874, the year of his earliest-known Australian painting, 'View

down Collins Street from Spring Street'.  The majority of his work is

dated between 1884 and 1907. In 1884 James Oddie commissioned

him to execute fourteen paintings of bush life which Oddie donated to

the newly founded Ballarat Fine Art Gallery.

Turner had several Melbourne addresses: at William Street in the

1870s and at least two in Collins Street in the 1880s. In 1888 he

bought a twenty-acre (8 ha) bushland property with a small dwelling

('The Gables') at Kilsyth, near Croydon, at the foot of the Dandenong

Ranges.

Turner married (firstly) Annie Margaret Williams on 29 October 1890

at St Peter's Church, East Melbourne, they lived at Hawthorn.  She

died in the following year after the birth of a stillborn child.  Turner

returned to Kilsyth in 1893 and remained there until 1907.  On 1 May

1900 he married Mary Ann Thomas (d.1950), daughter of the founder

of Thomastown, at the Government Statist's Office, Melbourne. 

Turner died suddenly of heart disease on 13 April 1908 at Canterbury

and was buried with Anglican rites in Box Hill cemetery.   He had no

children.

 

Local rural and bush life supplied subjects for his paintings which Table

Talk described as being of  'peculiar exactness'.  He was recognized in

1894 as 'our best known painter of incident'.

A prolific painter, Turner was a master of oil and water-colour.  Most of

his works are ‘Oil on Canvas’ or ‘Oil on canvas laid down on board’. 

There are a number of paired works done in Oil on circular tinplate

“disks”.  He also worked in gouache.

“Victoria loses an artist who not only understood and appreciated the

beauty of the bush, but could depict faithfully its life and character.  He

was, as a rule, content with small canvasses, homely incidents and quiet

aspects of nature.  At times he was exceedingly happy in his landscapes

and would often touch a very high if not inspired note.  No man ever

painted the realisms of a forest fire and its fighting better than he, or with

more absolute truth.  He was a very conscientious man, painting chiefly

to please himself, without any suspicion of pot-boiling, never allowing

work to leave his hands until he was thoroughly satisfied.”

 

He sometimes painted large works such as 'The Homestead Saved' (90

30 May 1980. Cole-Adams, Peter. Gippsland fire painting brings

$82,000. Sale of 'The Homestead saved'.