Eric Shanes is one of the world’s leading authorities on Turner, and in this book he brings together over forty years experience of working on the artist. The following was written of the first edition of this book:"Eric Shanes’s Turner offers, as we should expect from the editor of Turner Studies,an unusually rich and stimulating read, incorporating as it does the results ofmuch recent research."

J.M.W. Turner was arguably the greatest landscape and marine painter ever. His output was prodigious:some five hundred and fifty, oil paintings, over two thousand highly detailed and finely finished watercolours, and almost twenty thousand sketches,studies and rough watercolours. And he excelled in every branch of landscape and marine painting, from elaborate history pictures and idealized scenes in the classical tradition, to dny, jewellike watercolours of contemporary life on land and sea made for subsequent engraved reproduction.

Turner lived for his art. Ov-er the course of a long and busy fife he travelled many thousands of miles in search of material for his works, putting into practice his belief that "every glance is a glance for study" and training his memory so that nothing waswasted. He lived fairly secretively, prizing the needto paint above the niceties of a comfortable.ordered existence. He was always a moral landscape painter, holding deep comqctions about the nature of society and man’s place in the universe. Naturally these concerns frequently received expression in his art. They also led him to appear miserly, although only after his death did it become apparent that he wanted the fortune he had made by means of his talents to be used to found a chariw to assist less r_alented and fortunate artists, a wish that sadly was never fulfilled.

Throughout Turner’s art there is an unusually rich dramatic sensibility, an xrnmense interest in the complexities of life. an unmatched responsiveness to the scale and grandeur of nature, and a profound inquisitiveness about the behavioural realities that underlie appearances  what the painrer himself called "the qualities and causes" of things. This curiosttv led Turner ro explore the universal constants of man-made and natural architecture.the workings of light and meteorology, and the dynamics of the sea. Increasingly his powers as a colourist became stronger and ever more sophisticated, so that eventually he developed into not only one of the finest colourists m European painting but unquestionabl) the most subtle tonalisr in world art. Everywhere in his oeuvre, but especially in his later works, we can wimess the prol ection of an ideal world of colour, form and feeliny.

The Life

The Masterworks

The Archbishop’s Palace, Lambeth

Interior of Ka’ng John ’s Palace, Eltham

Tom Tower, Christ Church, Oxord

St Anselm’s Chapel, with part of Thomas-a-Beckets crown, Canterbury Cathedral

Fishermen at Sea

Woolverhampton, Stafordshire

Trancept of Ewenny Prioy Glamorganshire

Dolbadern Castle, North Wales

Caernarvon Castle, North Wales

Dutch Boats in a Gale: Fishermen Endeavouring to put their Fish on Board

Interior of Salisbury Cathedral, looking towards the North Transept

Calais Pier, with French Poissards preparingfor Sea: an English Packet arriving

Fall of the Reichenbach, in the valley of Oberhasli, Switzerland

The Shipwreck

The Thames near Walton Bridge

Sun rising through Vapour; Fishermen cleaning and selling Fish

Pope’s Villa at Twickenham

The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons

Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps

Mer de Glace, in tDe valley of CDamouni, Switzerland

Crossing tDe Brook

Dido building Carthage," or, the Rise of the Cathaginian Empire

The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire

Mount Vesuvius in Eruption

Crook of Lune, looking towards Hornby Castle

The Field of Waterloo

Dort or Dordrecht, the Dort Packet-Boat from Rplterdam becalmed

First-Rate, taking in stores

England." Richmond Hill on the Prince Regent’s Birthday

MARXBOURG and BRUGBERG on the RHINE

More Park, near Watford, on the River Colne

Dover Castle

A Storm (Shipwreck)

Rye, Sussex

The Baltle of Trafalgar

Portsmouth

tb’chmond Hill

Prudhoe Castle, Northumberland

Fontm Romanum, for Mr Soane’s Museum

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