The real Mr Turner: has Mike Leighs film got its man?

Timothy Spall plays the painter as a rough diamond, a blast of the roistering 18th century in the moralising Victorian era

Timothy Spalls Turner is a strange, magnificent being. He gurns, he growls, he mumbles and grumbles. It is impossible not to be fascinated and moved by him. His onscreen death made me cry. But how much does this great plum pie of a man churning his way through a 19th-century England resemble the actual JMW Turner, who was born in 1775 and died in 1851?

The real Turner was a lot more handsome and elegant, at least in his own eyes. Spalls Turner admits that when I look in the mirror, I see a gargoyle. Real Turner, when he was about 24 years old much younger than when we meet him in the film gazed in the mirror and saw a handsome, debonair, fiercely perceptive youth, his wide open eyes looking straight ahead, seeing everything.

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