[1] As a young man, he worked for Baltimore architect Frank M. Davis during the day,[2] while studying drawing at the evening school of the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts at night.

[3] He moved to New York City in 1872, where he worked as a colorist in a photographic studio during the day,[4] and attended the National Academy of Design evening school at night.

[4] The latter depicted a young widow and small child leaving a country graveyard, and was inspired by a line from Tennyson—"O death in life, the days that are no more.

In the foreground, it featured Native Americans, European colonists, and historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, Samuel Morse, Robert Fulton, and John Jay, all paying their respects to the Greek-gowned "Empress Manhattan," who was surrounded by female attendants.

One of his business partners had tried to get around the boycott by loading more than a ton of tea aboard the Peggy Stewart in London, hidden in seventeen crates marked "Linen."

The deception was supposedly discovered in mid-voyage, but when the ship arrived at Annapolis, the partner refused to pay the Crown tax on the tea.

[17] The first commission went to Turner—two large murals depicting the 1825 opening of the Erie Canal, for the DeWitt Clinton High School at 10th Avenue & West 58th Street, Manhattan.

[17] The first mural, Entering the Mohawk Valley, depicted Governor DeWitt Clinton and other dignitaries aboard the first barge to transverse the canal from Lake Erie to the Hudson River.

[17] General Washington at Fort Lee (1910) was an unusual choice of subject for a mural, since it depicted one of the Continental Army's most humiliating defeats in the Revolutionary War.

The twin forts were about 1 mi (1.6 km) apart—separated by the width of the river—and both had been built in Summer 1776 to prevent British warships from sailing any further north up the Hudson.

On the morning of November 16, 1776, the British Army executed a massive assault on Fort Washington, with some 8,000 soldiers attacking from the north, east and south.

Meanwhile, HMS Pearl bombarded the fort with cannon fire from the east, and prevented Washington from sending boats with reinforcements from New Jersey.

Turner's mural depicts Washington (on horseback) and his staff monitoring the attack from the opposite side of the Hudson, but powerless to intervene.

It was this defeat and Washington's subsequent retreat that inspired Thomas Paine to pen The American Crisis, and its famous opening sentence—"These are the times that try men's souls.

Muralist Francis Davis Millet was selected to be director of decoration for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and Turner, who had been runner-up for the job, agreed to be his assistant.

[21] He exhibited eleven oil paintings at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition—including The Grand Canal, Dordrecht, The Days That Are No More, and The Courtship of Miles Standish—and was awarded a Medal for Excellence.

"[28] He contracted Spanish flu, and died of pneumonia at Presbyterian Hospital, New York City, prior to dawn on January 1, 1919.