J.M.W. Turner was the son of a Covent Garden barber, sold his first drawings out of the shop window, got into the Royal Academy at fourteen, and became the most radical painter in England — and stayed a rough, secretive, unsociable man his whole life, with two daughters he barely acknowledged and a mistress nobody in the art world knew about. Moyle uses newly available material to fill in the private life, and she’s good on the working method: The tours on foot with a sketchbook, the varnishing days where he’d finish a painting in public, and the late work that went so far toward abstraction that critics thought he’d lost his mind.
Turner