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Born: 11 February 1850, Bradford, Yorkshire,
England
Died: 13 April 1908, Faversham Road,
Canterbury, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
JAMES ALFRED TURNER, artist, was born in
February 1850 at Bradford, Yorkshire, England, son
of John Turner, senior bank accountant, and his wife
Rhoda, née Oddy. He arrived, with his brother
Charles, in Melbourne on 10th April 1873, aboard
the Ophelia.
James came from a comfortable family life. He was
well educated and had undertaken a formal study of
Art. He came to Melbourne with the intention of
setting himself up as a full time artist at a time of
booming growth and extravagant prosperity.
1873 is the year of his earliest-known Australian
painting, 'The Kangaroo Hunt'. The majority of his
work is dated between 1880 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), at the Government Statist's Office,
Melbourne. Ann was the daughter of the founder of
Thomastown (Now a suburb of Melbourne).
Turner died suddenly of heart disease on 15 April
1908 at Canterbury and was buried with Anglican
rites in Box Hill cemetery. He had no children.
MORE >>
Much of what is known about Turner comes from the painstaking research of
Shirley Jones. She published her findings against a background of the area in
which Turner lived and painted in a booklet - A Quiet Painter. MORE >
CLICK photo to enlarge
BIOGRAPHY James Alfred Turner - Page 1 of 4
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