J.M.W. Turner died on 19 December 1851, aged 76, in a rented house on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, where his neighbors knew him as Admiral Booth. Cholera is the cause usually given, but the best evidence points to his heart.
He had been dying for months. By October 1851 he could no longer leave his bed, and two doctors came and went while his landlady, Sophia Booth, nursed him.
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Cholera is the answer most often given, and Turner did have it. He survived a severe attack a year before he died. The illness that nearly killed him had already passed.
What ended his life looks slower, and a doctor saw it coming. The weakness that would take him sat in his chest, and the cholera was behind him. About three weeks before the end, Dr David Price diagnosed a heart that was "very extensively diseased." I find that more convincing than any cholera story, because it was written at the bedside.
Why did no neighbor know his name?
Because he had given them someone else's. Around 1846 Turner moved into a small house by the Thames in Chelsea, with Sophia Booth and her son. Her husband had died in 1833.
Turner took her surname, and the Survey of London, citing Thornbury's early biography, records "his adoption of her name to conceal his identity."
He still owned a proper home, at Queen Anne Street, with a gallery full of his own paintings. By then it had become, in Tate's words, "squalid and neglected," and he left it in the care of his housekeeper, Hannah Danby.
The disguise held to the end. According to one account, the street learned who Admiral Booth really was only when his body was carried out of the house. Everywhere else he was the famous painter. In Chelsea he was an admiral with a failing heart.
What You'll Discover
What his doctor found weeks before.
What the sun did that morning.
Where his body went next.
Who fought over his will.