Sonnenuntergang über einem See

Turner painted this around 1840, in his mid-sixties, more and more leaving his canvases as dissolving fields of light. There is barely a subject left, a sun burning through haze, its colour smeared across the water, and off to the right a few strokes of white that may be Alpine snow, perhaps the mountains near Lake Lucerne, where he travelled often in these years. He never exhibited it. It stayed in his studio among the hundreds of unfinished and private canvases found there when he died in 1851, and it passed to the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, which is the reason a picture this experimental hangs in a public collection at all.