The Turner Erotica

J. M. W. Turner, Britain's greatest and most revolutionary artist, has died. While reviewing the contents of Turner's vast artistic legacy for Britain's National Gallery, John Ruskin, Turner's greatest supporter, discovers a considerable body of previously unknown erotic sketches. Both shocked and outraged, Ruskin abruptly burns the materials he finds offensive. However, through betrayal and theft, some of the erotica has escaped the flames... William James Stillman, a young American artist and diplomat, pursues a dangerous quest across Britain, Europe, and the Eastern United States to save the remaining sketches. He is convinced that the surviving erotic studies are not only invaluable to British art history, but contain a secret clue to the master's celebrated body of public work. Unlocking this secret becomes an obsession that threatens to consume Stillman and blind him to his obligations to his friends, his family, and even to himself. Based on actual people and events, this thrilling work features not only Turner himself, but such luminary characters as Allegra Fullerton, the Rossetti brothers, other artists from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and Britain's greatest swordsman and adventurer, Sir Richard Burton.

Up until a few years ago, biographies of both JMW Turner and John Ruskin had claimed that, in 1858, Ruskin burned bundles of erotic paintings and drawings by Turner in a fit of embarsassed Victorian censorship, to protect Turner's posthumous reputation. This title examines this little known aspect of the artist's oeuvre.

The life of one of Western art's most admired and misunderstood painters J.M.W. Turner is one of the most important figures in Western art, and his visionary work paved the way for a revolution in landscape painting. Over the course of his lifetime, Turner strove to liberate painting from an antiquated system of patronage. Bringing a new level of expression and color to his canvases, he paved the way for the modern artist. Turner was very much a man of his changing era. In his lifetime, he saw Britain ravaged by Napoleonic wars, revived by the Industrial Revolution, and embarked upon a new moment of Imperial glory with the ascendancy of Queen Victoria. His own life embodied astonishing transformation. Born the son of a barber in Covent Garden, he was buried amid pomp and ceremony in St. Paul's Cathedral. Turner was accepted into the prestigious Royal Academy at the height of the French Revolution when a climate of fear dominated Britain. Unable to travel abroad he explored at home, reimagining the landscape to create some of the most iconic scenes of his country. But his work always had a profound human element. When a moment of peace allowed travel into Europe, Turner was one of the first artists to capture the beauty of the Alps, to revive Venice as a subject, and to follow in Byron’s footsteps through the Rhine country. While he was commercially successful for most of his career, Turner's personal life remained fraught. His mother suffered from mental illness and was committed to Bedlam. Turner never married but had several long-term mistresses and illegitimate daughters. His erotic drawings were numerous but were covered up by prurient Victorians after his death. Turner's late, impressionistic work was held up by his Victorian detractors as example of a creeping madness. Affection for the artist’s work soured. John Ruskin, the greatest of all 19th century art critics, did what he could to rescue Turner’s reputation, but Turner’s very last works confounded even his greatest defender. TURNER humanizes this surprising genius while placing him in his fascinating historical context. Franny Moyle brilliantly tells the story of the man to give us an astonishing portrait of the artist and a vivid evocation of Britain and Europe in flux.

Lily, a librarian with a bookmobile, arrives in the small California town of Nolan to help start a book club. Across the ocean in an Alsatian chateau, an ancient Book of Cures is stolen and surreptitiously travels to a California coast library, then on to Nolan. Suspicion swirls around the three lonely club members. Unaware of the theft, they secretly pursue their curiosity about classical erotica, while sipping a strange tea infused with herbs grown in a gypsy garden. Mysterious events collide. A crime wave and a murder shake up the town, as the women are entangled deeper and deeper into a baffling puzzle of danger and death.

Alternating between nineteenth-century England and present-day New York, this is the story of renowned British painter J. M. W. Turner and his circle of patrons and lovers. It is also the story of Henry Leiden, a middle-aged family man with a troubled marriage and a dead-end job, who finds his life transformed by his discovery of Turner’s The Center of the World, a mesmerizing and unsettling painting of Helen of Troy that was thought to have been lost forever. This painting has such devastating erotic power that it was kept hidden for almost two centuries, and was even said to have been destroyed...until Henry stumbles upon it in a secret compartment at his summer home in the Adirondacks. Though he knows it is an object of immense value, the thought of parting with it is unbearable: Henry is transfixed by its revelation of a whole other world, one of transcendent light, joy, and possibility. Back in the nineteenth century, Turner struggles to create The Center of the World, his greatest painting, but a painting unlike anything he (or anyone else) has ever attempted. We meet his patron, Lord Egremont, an aristocrat in whose palatial home Turner talks freely about his art and his beliefs. We also meet Elizabeth Spencer, Egremont’s mistress and Turner’s muse, the model for his Helen. Meanwhile, in the present, Henry is relentlessly trailed by an unscrupulous art dealer determined to get his hands on the painting at any cost. Filled with sex, beauty, and love (of all kinds), this richly textured novel explores the intersection between art and eroticism.

Focusing on the impact of the erotic revolution that swept through 16th-century Italy, Eros Visible presents a compendious, revisionist account of High Renaissance art. Through close visual analysis of artworks and careful reading of related texts, James Grantham Turner demonstrates the surprisingly close connection between explicitly pornographic art and the canonical works of masters such as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Full of new discoveries, this volume explores the passionate response to antiquity and how a new sex-positive philosophy not only encouraged an increased accentuation of sensual and erotic themes in art, but influenced the sexual cultures of both the court and the art studio. With an interdisciplinary approach that draws on a wide array of visual and textual erotica, Turner offers the first broad, synthetic history of the classically inspired and unambiguously lascivious sensibilities behind some of the most sublime artistic achievements of the Renaissance.

Some helpful rules to stay alive during an apocalypse: 1. Keep your socks dry. 2. Don't eat expired tuna. Seriously. 3. Grab the baddest scariest guy you see and don't let go. 4. Do whatever he says (you might just like it). 5. Don't fall in love. They say romance died when society collapsed. They were right. It's brutal out here. My last date had no teeth. He took me to the Great Tire Fire and roasted a rat on a stick. I was convinced I was going to die alone at the tender old age of twenty-two until I saw Max. He was wearing a freaking skull on his head. It was terror at first sight. But like bacteria on wet socks, Max will grow on you. And this obsessive alpha might just give me the best happy ending you can get in this nightmarish hellscape. The Ravagers were formed to kill all the zombies. Now that the zombies are long gone, who's left to take out the Ravagers? They're cruel, barbaric men who raid and steal from the ordinary people trying to make a life after the carnage. When Marley gets stolen on a raid, she's expecting the worst, but she gets the best-she gets Max. Insta-love at its finest in a SAFE read with no cheating and a HEA guaranteed. Enjoy!

Carefully curated and beautifully packaged erotic art through the ages – 200 works from the world's most important artists. This carefully curated and beautifully packaged book spotlights nearly 200 works from the world's most important artists, including Titian, Paul Cézanne, Picasso, Andy Warhol, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Lucian Freud, Louise Bourgeois, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, Cecily Brown, Anselm Kiefer, George Condo, and Anish Kapoor. With its chronological organization, The Art of the Erotic provides insights into human sexuality throughout the ages.

Turner's sketchbooks' offer perhaps themost appealing introduction to the artist. They give us a privileged look over Turner's shoulder, allowing us to witness the creation and development of ideas that can be traced through to his major paintings. In the absence of detailed written accounts of his extensive travels, the notebooks are also a record of his impressions of the many places he visited across Britain and Europe. This book is the first to survey the full range of Turner's sketchbooks, beginning with his teenage efforts and culminating in the atmospheric colour studies of his last years.