Publisher's Synopsis
Joseph Mallord William Turner was the son of a Covent Garden barber and a woman who died in Bethlehem mental hospital. During his lifetime (1775-1851), Turner achieved fame and fortune for a range of work encompassing seascape and landscape, immensely powerful oil paintings and intimate watercolors.;Anthony Bailey has set out to write a biography of the man, not a book about his paintings. Both reclusive and gregarious, private and vainglorious, tough and vulnerable, a long-term bachelor who fathered two daughters, Turner was full of contradictions.
