J. M. W. Turner by Peter Ackroyd

Mike Leigh's movie, Mr.Turner, premiered just last year. It's a film about the career of the great British Romanticist landscape painter, J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851). The critics praised it but many viewers were challenged by the central performance (Turner was gruff and lacking in social skills), the chronology of his life (did the story cover five years or twenty?), and the length of the movie (2 1/2 hours). It's a beautiful piece of filmmaking and it made me more curious about the artist. 

I knew of Turner's paintings but not much about his life, so I went to the library shelves and discovered Peter Ackroyd's J. M. W. Turner, the second biography in the author's Brief Lives series. It's all of 160 pages, but it tells the full story.  (Leigh tells us that his movie only focuses on the final twenty-five years of Turner's life.)

So, who was Turner? He was the son of a barber/wigmaker and, due to the mother's mental instability, the father who raised him. His talent for art was recognized early and at the age of fifteen his work was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art. By the time he was in his early twenties he had begun to focus on landscape and particularly maritime studies. He was as accomplished with watercolor as he was with oil. Fortunately, he had the support of some well-heeled patrons and he was a good businessman. Financial success gave him independence and that independence gave him the freedom to be more experimental. Turner's expressionist studies in light, color, and atmosphere were unmatched in his time and these works predate the Impressionists by decades.

If you are curious, the Ackroyd Brief Lives biography is a good place to start. The library has many additional books that reproduce his art including J. M. W. Turner: Painting Set Free (2014), the exhibition catalog for a show that has traveled from the Tate (London) to the Getty (Los Angeles) and is now on view at the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco.

And then there is Mr.Turner, Mike Leigh's movie, also available for loan from the library.