William Turner (1789-1862), known as "Turner of Oxford" to distinguish him from his more famous contemporary J.M.W. Turner, was a watercolourist whose entire career centred on the landscape of Oxfordshire and the countryside immediately around the city that gave him his name. Born at Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, he was orphaned young and raised by an uncle at the manor house of Shipton-on-Cherwell, near Woodstock, where he probably received his first drawing lessons from William Delamotte. He moved to London in 1804 to become one of the earliest pupils of John Varley, working alongside fellow students William Henry Hunt, John Linnell and William Mulready, and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1807.
In 1808, at only eighteen, Turner was elected the youngest-ever member of the Society of Painters in Water Colours (now the Royal Watercolour Society), to which he contributed exhibits every year for the rest of his life, and the same year he helped found the influential Sketching Society alongside Cornelius Varley. He settled permanently in Oxford around 1811 to 1812, establishing himself as a drawing master to university students and amateurs alike, and his paintings, characterised by broad, calm compositions, dramatic cloud effects and a recurring stillness quite different from J.M.W. Turner's more turbulent Romanticism, drew repeated praise from the critic John Ruskin, who singled out several of his exhibited works for particular attention in successive reviews of the Watercolour Society's shows. Turner travelled extensively through Britain over his career, sketching in Wales, the Lake District, Cornwall and, on several occasions from 1838 onwards, the west coast of Scotland, but it is his views of the countryside around Oxford, above all his celebrated view of the city from Hinksey Hill, for which he remains best remembered. He died in Oxford in 1862 and was given a retrospective exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in 1898, where a number of his works remain on permanent display.
The two paintings by Turner of Oxford held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, a view towards Cheltenham and a Scottish Highland scene at Loch Torridon, illustrate the geographical range of his practice beyond his signature Oxfordshire subjects, while his broader reputation as the definitive painter of Oxford's landscape connects naturally with the gallery's holdings of George Pyne's Oxford college views, offering two complementary perspectives, topographical and rural, on the same historic city.