J.M.W. Turner’s work has a wonderful quality of generosity about it. He was so prolific, varied and inventive in his painting that it can be enjoyed and studied in numerous ways and retains an extraordinary popularity. As 2025 is the 250th anniversary of Turner’s birth in 1775, we can look forward to attractive initiatives that celebrate the artist’s achievement.

A distinguished scholar of Islamic art, who worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Oliver Watson also published on Studio Ceramics and nurtured the careers of many younger colleagues.

The story that Richard Dorment tells in this meticulously researched book should be a cause of considerable concern to museum directors, curators, art historians, art dealers, conservators and collectors, as well as those engaged in art law. As Dorment shows with devastating clarity, the business of authenticating works by Andy Warhol (1928– 87) in the early 2000s was indeed a business.