num_pages: 161
description: The second short biography in Peter Ackroyd’s Brief Lives series concentrates on the life and work of perhaps the greatest and most original of all English Painters.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. He was short and pugnacious and, as Peter Ackroyd "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 "The Sun is God." Turner 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.This is the biography that Peter Ackroyd was born to Turner’s Englishness, his temperament and his London background lie at the core of Ackroyd’s lively personal interest in and specialist knowledge of London’s history.
language: English
title: Turner
titlecomplete: Turner
genres: Art History, Biography, Historical, British Literature, Nonfiction, Art, History
ratings_count: 229
series: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
publisher: Chatto & Windus