Charles Turner (engraver)
Charles Turner (31 August 1774, Woodstock, Oxfordshire – London 1 August 1857) was an English mezzotint engraver and draughtsman who specialized in portraiture. He collaborated with J. M. W. Turner (to whom he was not related) on the early plates of the same's Liber Studiorum. Life Turner was born at Woodstock in Oxfordshire. His father, also named Charles, was an excise officer, and his mother, Jane was a former paid companion to the Duchess of Marlborough at Blenheim Palace. Following his father's death, his mother returned to the Duchess's service, with the result that Turner had access to the gallery at the palace. He moved to London in about 1789, where he worked for John Boydell, a major print publisher, and enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools. He made his first mezzotint in 1795, working from a portrait of John Kirby, the keeper of Newgate, painted by his friend John James Masquerier, and immediately afterwards produced a stipple engraving after a portrait of Joshua Reynolds. Turner's biographer, Alfred Whitman, dismisses a tradition in the artist's family that he was apprenticed to George Jones, who was in fact younger than Turner, but suggests that he may have come under the influence