Central to Turner's early career was his series of oil paintings and works on paper depicting seascapes from around the British Isles.

Joseph Mallord William Turner is arguably Britain's greatest and most mysterious painter, whose range of work encompasses seascape and landscape, immensely powerful oil paintings and intimate watercolours. His friend and colleague C.R. Leslie remembered him thus: 'Turner was short and stout, and had a sturdy, sailor-like walk. He might be taken for the captain of a river steamboat at first glance; but a second would find more in his face than belongs in any ordinary mind. There was that peculiar keenness of expression in his eye that is only seen in men of constant habits of observation'. The son of a Covent garden barber and a woman who died in Bethlehem 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. In this previously unavailable biography, Anthony Bailey has drawn upon archival material, scholarly literature and research, as well as studying many of Turner's sketchbooks, paintings and watercolours. Uncovering fresh material, as well as pulling together previously known facts, Bailey sheds new light on this complicated and secretive artistic figure.

It seems safe to assume that people started to drop things as soon as they started to pick them up, and that even the most aboriginal litterings and spillages did not pass entirely without comment. Mess is age-old and universal, both as phenomenon and as topic. The evidence collected in thisbook suggests, however, that the second half of the nineteenth century saw the first stirrings in Western culture of a primary interest in mess for its own sake: a development which had something to do with the gradual fading, amid a great deal of reassertion, of doctrines of determinism; andsomething to do with democracy, which would be hard to imagine without litter. Messes, like modern identities, happen by accident; their representation, in painting and fiction, made it possible to think boldly and inventively about chance. Ranging widely-from Turner to Courbet, Cezanne, and Degas,and from Melville to Maupassant, Chekhov, Gissing, and the New Woman writers-this book outlines a style of commentary on modern life in which the ancient dichotomy of order and chaos (culture and anarchy) was supplanted, at least temporarily, by a distinction between different kinds and qualities ofmess.