Born: 11 February 1850, Bradford, Yorkshire, England Died: 13 April 1908, Faversham Road, Canterbury, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. JAMES ALFRED TURNER, was the son of John Turner, a 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. These were all later sold by a new incoming Director to finance their preferred acquisitions. Turner worked from several William Street, Melbourne addresses 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 for a time 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.

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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. (See SHOP)

BIOGRAPHY James Alfred Turner - Page 1 of 4

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