Ackroyd has built his reputation with substantial biographies and big, bustling books, including London: A Biography (2001) and Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2003). He now turns his hand to an increasingly popular form, the brief life, and conveys with knowledge and panache the temperament and achievements of the great English painter J. M. W. Turner. Ackroyd writes sensitively of Turner's mother's mental illness and the painter's close relationship with his father, a London barber, who was so supportive of his determined son's brilliant career. Turner emerges from the page as a short, rather plebian--looking fellow who eschewed religion and seems to have been born to work, travel, and stay free of the entanglements of love. Ackroyd indelibly portrays the tireless, self-possessed Turner avidly sketching and writing somewhat incoherent verse, a "Cockney visionary" fueled by the same romantic sensibility as Wordsworth and Coleridge yet possessing a good head for business and a cosmic appreciation for light, fire, water, and storms. Ultimately, Ackroyd's pleasure in Turner's story becomes our own.