Turner - Peter Ackroyd

The Turner and Claude room in the National Gallery in London is one of my favourite places and a regular lunchtime haunt when I used to work around there, so I was delighted to pick up a short biography of England's Greatest Painter* by a particularly fine writer.

Ackroyd is as good as ever at contextualizing London life, and he paints a sympathetic portrait of a character often regarded as eccentrically cantankerous.

I also liked this from his description of Turner's late masterpiece The Fighting Temeraire:

...the art of colour itself is taken to the highest possible pitch. It is deployed, like music or the language of poetry, for its own sake without any recourse to some ultimate reality. the light is not of this earth but has the effulgence of a vision.

* Hogarth and Freud being his only serious competition