Brief Lives 2 - Turner [Paperback]

"'Ackroyd is the laureate of London' Daily Express 'gets closer to the heart of Turner than a book ten times as long.Everything seems pertinent, vivid and miraculously revealed.Ackroyd has a sure instinct for what matters' Mail on Sunday 'Distills Ackroyd's knowledge and inspiration in a dazzling work' Torquay Herald Express"

Short and potent lives of creative geniuses by a master. The second in Ackroyd's series of BRIEF LIVES distils his knowledge and inspiration in a dazzling short life of another 'Cockney visionary', perhaps the greatest and most original of all English painters, J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851)

James Mallord William Turner 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 brought up in Maiden Lane (the family moving at some point from the south side of the street to the north side). 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 streets.'His language was also the language of light, as exemplified in his most innovative paintings, which caused the critics of the day to come to blows. . His dying words were: 'The Sun is God.' He entered the Royal Academy at 14 and a year later was exhibiting. His first loves were architecture, engraving and watercolours, and the country houses, cathedrals and landscape of England; he came to oils through his new passion for Italy. He was mean with money, never married, and spent a lot of his life living in taverns. When he died (within sight of his beloved Thames) he was living under the name of Booth in the Chelsea lodgings of one of his mistresses, a Mrs Booth. (20040624)

Short and potent lives of creative geniuses by a master. The second in Ackroyd's series of BRIEF LIVES distils his knowledge and inspiration in a dazzling short life of another 'Cockney visionary', perhaps the greatest and most original of all English painters, J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851)

Peter Ackroyd is of course a Cockney visionary himself. He has written and presented a 3-part TV series for the BBC on London. He is the author of London: The Biography and Illustrated London, and very few of his prize-winning biographies and novels stray far from his London obsessions - Turner was one of the subjects of a lecture that Ackroyd gave at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1993 (also televised) entitled London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries; and Turner was also central to his Times article on Reflections on British art. (20040624)