Sonnenaufgang mit Seeungeheuern

Turner painted this around 1845, near the end of his life, at Margate on the Kent coast, a place he returned to for its light over the sea. He never finished it and never showed it. It stayed in his studio until he died in 1851 and was not put on public view until 1906. What the reddish shapes in the lower left actually are has been argued over ever since. They are usually called sea monsters, but the Tate, which owns the picture, takes a plainer view and reads them as fish, with a few dark marks that may be a fishing net. By this point Turner was letting solid things dissolve almost entirely into light and weather, and here the sky and the grey water blur into a single hazy field.