The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J. M. W. Turner
FRANNY MOYLE
First some facts: Ruskin did not burn Turner’s erotic drawings. Turner’s claim to have been lashed to a storm-driven mast was probably mischief. He uttered no famous last words.
“Turner scholarship is vast,” writes Franny Moyle. Even her lengthy “very select” bibliography excludes the late and always lamented Judy Egerton’s 142-page catalogue for the National Gallery’s 1995 London exhibition, “Turner: The Fighting Temeraire”. She provides a page turner (pun unintended), which provides the nuance Mike Leigh’s recent film Mr Turner lacked, with Timothy Spall in the title role doing little more than grunt. Mr Turner confined itself to the last third of his 76 years, whereas nearly half of Moyle’s book covers the first 26, the remarkably young age at which Turner was elected a full member of the Royal Academy and could already command £250 for an oil painting. Her central argument is that he was not “a man out of his time, but profoundly the product of it”; born in the eighteenth century, he benefited from and successfully exploited the sea changes of the nineteenth.
