Joseph Mallord William Turner is Britain's greatest and most mysterious artist, whose range of work encompasses seascape and land-scape, immensely powerful oil paintings and intimate watercolours. The son of a Covent Garden barber and a woman who dies in Bethlehem mental hospital, Turner achieved fame and fortune during his lifetime. Although he possessed a wide-ranging imagination, he was an often incoherent speaker and writer, and his muddled will produced much discord. It is a wonder that, despite avaricious relatives and incompetent lawyers, so many of his works are now in the hands of the nation, and publicly proclaim his genius. Anthony Bailey has set out to write a biography of the man, not a book about his paintings, and Turner comes wonderfully to life in these pages. Both lonely and gregarious, private and vainglorious, Turner's character was full of contradictions and Anthony Bailey rises to the challenge to describe them.