J. M. W. Turner: His Art and Life

Secaucus, NJ: Poplar Books, 1979. Hardcover. VG-/VG- (some light tanning/fading to some interior pages, light corner and edge wear to book and dust jacket, old bookstore sticker on front of dust jacket). Blue paper boardswith silver stamped lettering on spine, color-illustrated dust jacket with black lettering. 527 pp. Numerous color and bw plates. "Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) is by general consent the greatest of British artists, and perhaps the greatest of all landscape painters. His enormous output, consisting of some five hundred oil-paintings and sketches, many thousands of watercolors, and a mass of drawings preserved in sketchbooks, as well as sizeable group of prints, has always attracted critics, biographers, collectors and scholars. Only in recent years, however, have his life and work been subjected to the thorough scrutiny that is accorded to the greatest figures in the history of art, and even now, though much work has been done on the biography and the oil-paintings, Turner's activity as a watercolorist and printmaker has been neglected. This book surveys the whole of his art as the unified product of an exceptionally complex and diverse creative personality, discussing Turner's psychology, the theoretical origins and the technical development of his style. In particular, his astonishing achievement as a watercolorist is reconginzed as the central part of his output, in which his aims and intentions are more fully realized than in his better-known oil-paintings, which are, however, treated to an extensive analysis." - dust jacket description.