Cologne: The Arrival of a Packet-Boat: Evening

Turner sent three heavily yellow paintings to the Royal Academy in 1826, this Rhine quayside among them, with the passenger boat coming in to Cologne at the end of the day. The British Press ran a review complaining that all was yellow, nothing but yellow, violently contrasted with blue, and that his work could not be looked at without pain. The story that came down from the exhibition is that this canvas hung between two portraits by Thomas Lawrence, then president of the Academy, and simply killed them. Turner, seeing how unhappy Lawrence was, brushed a wash of lampblack across his own sky, remarking that it would all come off afterwards. Great Saint Martin's church still stands over the river on the skyline he painted.