The Scots-born cabinetmaker Ralph Turnbull emigrated to Jamaica with his brothers Cuthbert and Thomas sometime in the early 19th century.
Records indicate it was probably around 1815, and by 1819 the brothers were established enough to advertise their skills in the Kingston Chronicle.
Kingston was a thriving city built on the success of the sugar trade, and the English merchants and officials were a receptive market for locally made furniture, albeit influenced by current English prototypes. While it is believed the brothers worked together for the first years after their arrival in Jamaica, by the early 1820s each had established his own workshop and advertised accordingly, trying to distinguish himself from other Turnbull competition. It is Ralph who was the most successful however, and the only one to label his furniture, perhaps in a bid to distiguish his work from that of this brothers.
The Turnbull style is particularly idiosyncratic, not for the forms employed, but for the lavish use of exotic veneers, many of Jamaican origin, and the use of marquetry to embellish the surfaces.
