J. M. W. TURNER

James Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was a Londoner through and through. His father had a barber's shop in Covent Garden, his mother came from a line of London butchers. He was short and pugnacious, and as Peter Ackroyd writes: 'His speech was recognizably that of a Cockney, and his language was the language of the street.'

He was both the most admired and the most derided painter of his time. He wanted to excel in all forms of painting - from landscape to historical and allegorical - and to use every form of painterly medium - oil, gouache, watercolour, even engraving. His vision soon outran the taste and even the understanding of his contemporaries, as he began to experiment in pure forms of light and colour, producing masterpieces of impassioned tonality that were still unsold at the time of his death.

Though he travelled widely, he never strayed far from the banks of his home river. He lived by the Thames, in cottages in Hammersmith and Isleworth, and he died by it, in a rented house in Chelsea. He was always secretive and kept a mistress about whom little was known. Reputed to be taciturn, miserly, even mad, he was, in truth, a generous and emotional man who grew tired of the world's attention.

Peter Ackroyd's short biography reveals the genius of the artist and the abiding qualities of the man. In the process, it describes Turner's London and the singular characteristics of a 'Cockney visionary' who changed the nature of English art.