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Returns due to popular demand! JMW Turner is one of Britain's greatest, and most loved painters. His life was as exciting and varied as his paintings. Turner's House is delighted to host Turner's critically acclaimed biographer Franny Moyle for a series of four lectures that cover the artist's life from his earliest days as an aspiring landscape artist to the radical and exciting works of his later years.

The lectures will be available live online.

4th May – The little Georgian

Franny charts Turner's earliest development as a young landscape artist while a student at the Royal Academy. She will trace his exploration of the British landscape from his early studies of London to the profound influence of boyhood holidays in Bristol and the South West on his unique and personal early style.

11th May – Ambitious Professional

In this lecture Franny will consider Turner's astonishing ambition; his readiness to embrace and reinterpret classical themes as well as his determination to explore a new Romantic engagement with landscape.

This lecture looks at the work of Turner after his appointment to the Royal Academy and during the period of the Napoleonic wars.

18th May – Turner Abroad

This lecture will consider Turner as the annual traveller. As Europe became more accessible to British tourists after the defeat of Napoleon, travel became a major motivation for the painter. Franny will explore Turner's love affair with the Continent and some of its great cities, particularly Rome and Venice, from 1819 until the very end of his life.

25th May – Turner the Modern painter

In her final lecture Franny considers the last 15 years of Turner's working life. During this time his interest in the modern world became apparent. Turner emerged as the prototype modern painter, determined make art in an entirely unprecedented manner, where the expression of the inner self and the primacy of the imagination breaks through.