Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks – a fascinating portrait of the great painter

Two hundred and fifty years after his birth, Joseph Mallord William Turner remains an “enigma”, said James Jackson in The Times : “a grunting curmudgeon, an establishment outsider, a visitor of prostitutes”, and an artist whose work “touches the sublime”. This new BBC2 documentary seeks to shed light on Turner’s character through close examination of his rarely seen sketchbooks: not just landscape studies and preliminary compositions that he would later turn into paintings, but also reams of “pornographic sketches”. The result is a show that zips “rather fascinatingly ... in and out of Turner’s id, ego and superego”.

An eclectic range of contributors offer their interpretations, said Roland White in the Daily Mail . Psychoanalyst Orna Guralnik, for instance, suggests that Turner’s det