It was a masterpiece. Nobody bought it. (re: Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844)

Others, faced with Turner’s competitiveness were less contented. C.R. Leslie was on hand when Turner’s Helvoetsluys, to start with “a grey pictre, beautiful and true, but with no positive colour in any part of it”,...

In 1846 on of his Academy exhibits was a painting called The Angel Standing in the Sun. Turner found this passage for the Academy catalogue in the Book of Revelation: And I saw an angel...

Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner...

The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way is the one that achieves madness.

I’m a long way from Ike Turner.

He is a Londoner, too, in his writings. In his familiar letters he displays a rambling urban vivacity, a tendency to to veer off the point and to muddle his syntax. He had a brilliantly...