Lindsay's book is rather good, and we can understand how cross he was that Turner biography had been disabled from the beginning. The field for a definitive life is still open, though led by Peter Ackroyd, who has recently published biographies of Dickens and T S Eliot.Ruskin confined himself to interpretation and a few scraps of reminiscence. His criticism of Turner's art may be unbalanced, but it has a properly elevated note. Here is some of only a little English writing on art that belongs to the nation's literature rather than the nation's books.

In the impressionistic, beautiful chapter of the fifth and final volume of Modern Painters (1860), 'The Two Boyhoods', Ruskin imagined Giorgione and Turner when children: one future painter looking out to the golden ether of the Venice lagoon, the other, just a nipper from Maiden Lane in Covent Garden, where his father was a barber, running down to the odoriferous Thames and 'that mysterious forest below London Bridge': better for the boy than wood of pine or grove of myrtle. How he must have tormented the watermen, beseeching them to let him crouch anywhere in the bows, quiet as a log, so only that he might get floated down there among the ships, and under the ships, staring, and clambering - these the only quite beautiful things he can see in all the world, except the sky. which ships are also inhabited by glorious creatures - red-faced sailors, with pipes appearing over the gunwales, true knights, over their castle parapets - the most angelic beings in the whole compass of London world. .I believe Ruskin had such information from Turner's own lips, then wrote it up Otherwise he was reserved about Turner's beginnings. Looking at the earlier works, one is initially tempted to say that Turner's apprenticeship was as modest as his last phase was extravagant. From his penny-earning childhood he made architectural drawings, views of country houses and so on But they are more than competent.

He took the picturesque and gave the convention a singular beauty Turner was always to do this. Instinctively and with all the force of his creative spirit he imbued his paintings with a pungent loveliness - glorifying formulae that lesser artists treated by rote. This kind of enhancement is hard to describe but it makes Turner immediately recognisable (and is the reason why he's so difficult to fake).Along with this instinct for embellishment went a liking for the most ordinary localities: Brentwood in Middlesex, for instance, where his uncle was a butcher; Sunningwell, further up the Thames valley, where the river runs no faster and there was nothing much beyond fields; and then there's this attachment to brickfields, yards, the backs of houses, inlets and jetties, the places where a boy might play and yet be not far from his father's work. Turner continually returned to those themes, especially of boys who left their fishing-rods to help dad with threshing, cooperage or whatever. It is as though he had missed his own proper childhood because he had work to do: art, which could not be shared with other lads.Here was the initial and abiding sadness of his life, and the reason why he was to cling so emotionally to people in the same business as himself, other painters. Professional from the first, he overcame the constraints of his calling, especially its humble status, and was determined to enjoy its honours and rewards.He could not however manage the graces of a rising professional A woman who met the 23-year-old painter described him thus:. a plain uninteresting youth both in manners and appearance, he was very careless and slovenly in his dress, not particular and was anything but a nice looking man.

He would talk of nothing but his drawings, and of the places to which he should go for sketching. He seemed an uneducated youth, desirous of nothing but improvement in his art .He was not a man for the drawing room He drove a hard bargain and was to use a tough agent. But he did have patrons, both from the old aristocracy and the rising middle class, and that they too could be difficult men, with the same obsessive streak as the painter himself.HIS APPRENTICESHIP finished at the age of 21, when he began to exhibit at the Royal Academy. Now he began to invent his own watercolour techniques, a sign of personal confidence.