Joseph Mallord William Turner is Britain's greatest and most mysterious artist, whose range of work encompasses seascape and landscape, immensely powerful oil paintings and intimate watercolours. The son of a Covent Garden barber and a woman who died in Bethlehem mental hospital, Turner achieved fame and fortune during his lifetime. Although he possessed a wide-ranging imagination, he was an often incoherent speaker and writer, and his muddled will produced much discord. It is a wonder that, despite avaricious relatives and incompetent lawyers, so many of his works are now in the hands of the nation, and publicly proclaim his genius.
For this new biography, the first comprehensive narrative of his life in a generation, Anthony Bailey searched archives, studied scholarly literature and looked at almost all of Turner's sketchbooks to shed new light on this complicated and secretive man.
