page_title: Dawson Turner
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Dawson Turner / Life
caption_attribution_description: Dawson Turner. Stipple engraving by A. Fox after M. W. Sharp. Iconographic Collections Keywords: portrait prints; stipple prints; Dawson Turner
context_page_description: Dawson Turner FRS was an English banker, botanist and antiquary. He specialized in the botany of cryptogams and was the father-in-law of the botanist William Jackson Hooker.
context_section_description: Turner was the son of James Turner, head of the Gurney and Turner's Yarmouth Bank and Elizabeth Cotman, the only daughter of the mayor of Yarmouth, John Cotman. He was educated at North Walsham Grammar School (now Paston College), Norfolk and at Barton Bendish as a pupil of the botanist Robert Forby. He then went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where the Master was his uncle Rev. Joseph Turner. He however left without a degree due to his father's terminal illness. In 1796, he joined his father's bank.
  After becoming a banker, he took a more intensive interest in botany in leisure time, collecting specimens in the field. In 1794, Turner offered to help James Sowerby with specimens. Turner published a number of books and collaborated with other botanists. In December 1802, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1816, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
  By 1820, his interest in botany had been replaced by an interest in antiquities. He and his children were taught drawing by renowned Norfolk artist John Sell Cotman who became a good friend. They travelled to Normandy together and collaborated on a book, Architectural Antiquities of Normandy, published in 1822, with Cotman providing the etchings.
  Turner died in 1858 and is buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.
caption: Dawson Turner. Stipple engraving by A. Fox after M. W. Sharp
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