Turner
A Life
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
The definitive biography of J.M.W. Turner.
'A pleasure to read'.' A.S. BYATT
'With splendid clarity and shrewd humour, James Hamilton evokes the visceral world of a great artist and a fascinating character.' MIKE LEIGH
In 1799, aged just 24, Turner became an Associate of the Royal Academy. While influential collectors competed to buy his paintings, he travelled widely, observing landscape and people and gathering material for a cycle of images that would come to express the collective identity of Britain.
In this lucid blend of vibrant biography and acute art history, James Hamilton introduces Turner to a new generation of readers and paints a picture of a uniquely generous human being, a giant of the nineteenth century and a beacon for the twenty-first.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Employing newly available sketchbooks, Hamilton (Turner and the Scientists) contends that painter J.W.M. Turner (1775 1851) was a prodigy who first exhibited his work in his father's barber shop and owed his fame to innate opportunism as much as to matchless talent. The sketchbooks reveal a young man anxiously seeking institutional favor, painstakingly preparing his 1811 lectures on perspective in the hopes of defeating his famous inarticulacy. They trace Turner's charge through the English countryside, where he scaled improbable heights and expertly sketched scenes (many later completed from memory). Hamilton attributes this frenetic activity to Turner's obsession with the preciousness of both money and time, and suggests that the latter concern eventually prevailed. Once at home in the Royal Academy and convinced of his genius, Turner could afford to flout public opinion and devote himself to quixotic pursuit of the colors and tones churned by "the engine of the air." One critic, fearing Turner's influence on younger artists, dubbed him "over-Turner," while scientists esteemed his Prospero-like light effects. Somewhat dismayed by the discomfiting details of his subject's life Turner apparently disregarded his children, enjoyed pornography and consigned his mother to an insane asylum until her death Hamilton downplays them. His affectionate, dignified study is designed for scholars who will relish Turner's travel itineraries, housing plans and overwrought poems trivia that serve less to illuminate Turner's work than to selectively humanize his myth. Three 8-page color photo inseres not seen by PW. (On sale June 3)
