Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in Covent Garden, London, in 1775. His father was a barber, and he was the first to discover his son's talent: he would hang Turner's drawings in his shop window, sell them for a few shillings, and tell his customers, "My son will be a painter." His mother's mental health deteriorated during Turner's youth; she was hospitalized and died there. Turner rarely spoke about this throughout his life. He learned painting through regular training. At fourteen, he was admitted to the Royal Academy schools; he learned perspective from Thomas Malton, known for his architectural drawings. His real training ground, however, was the evening studio at the home of Dr. Monro, a physician and collector: Turner, along with his peer Thomas Girtin, honed his skills there by copying the master watercolors of the time; Monro paid the young men a small fee per evening and provided them with food. Girtin was both his friend and his most serious rival, and he died at the age of twenty-seven; Turner is said to have remarked that if Girtin had lived, he would have starved. His rise was early and rapid: at twenty-one, his moonlit seascape established his fame; at twenty-six, he was elected a full member of the Academy; and a few years later, he became a professor of perspective. This point is important because it corrects a common misconception about Turner: he was not a genius who was misunderstood during his lifetime. On the contrary, he was one of the most successful and expensive painters of his time; what critics failed to understand was his late period, when he chose to unravel and dissipate his style after he had already amassed his fortune. Those late paintings, met with ridicule as soap bubbles and whitewash, are today considered his finest works. He was a road painter: he traveled through Britain, then the Alps, France, and Italy with his sketchbooks; he went to Venice three times. His eccentricities were also famous. He refused to sell his favorite paintings, becoming so attached to one that he wrote "my darling" in a letter; yet he neglected his own gallery so much that one visitor described his glittering masterpieces sitting in a dusty, neglected, rain-soaked room. He was famous for spending hours repainting a painting on the wall in front of his colleagues during the polishing days before exhibition openings; these displays became legendary at the Academy. He never married; he is known to have had two daughters. He spent his final years in Chelsea, hiding his identity and using his landlady's surname, Mr. Booth; his neighbours did not know that he was England's most famous painter. He died in 1851 and was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. His last words are said to have been "the sun is god"; a beautiful saying, but its source is uncertain and may have been a later addition. His will is certain: he bequeathed almost everything in his studio to the nation. This bequest, consisting of hundreds of oil paintings and tens of thousands of sketches and watercolors, is now largely preserved at Tate Britain. His approach, which made light the central subject of painting, paved the way for Impressionism; today Britain's most prestigious contemporary art award bears his name, and his portrait appears on the twenty-pound banknote.