Customer Reviews

The Oxford Companion to J. M. W. Turner (Oxford Companions)

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Maybe I am silly but if you are going to call a book a companion on a painter you should have plenty of paintings from each of the periods in his/her life to share with the reader. This book is primarily sound even exciting scholarship with a paltry amount of paintings.
If you are taking a graduate course in art history it is right on target however if you are madly in love with the art of this giant go elsewhere for your pleasure.

Although certain Oxford Companions have been flawed -- that to "Film" had a lot of errors; and in my minority opinion that to "English Literature" wastes far too much space on tangential matters -- most are informative, authoritative, and endlessly browsable. This new Companion to Turner belongs among them. With all the detail it offers about Turner, it's a substantial work and one that will only appeal to those who already have one or more collections of his works; it's understandable that this volume does not duplicate these; if it did, its weight and size (and unwieldiness) and price would rocket.

My only disappointment so far is admittedly peripheral: why does such a scholarly (and expensive) volume not come in the black (or immensely dark blue) cloth that OUP gives to most of its hardbacks?