Landscape with a river and a bay in the background

Turner never finished this one, and never meant anyone to see it. In his last years, around 1845, he left dozens of canvases like it blocked in as broad washes of light and water, the detail never added. Collectors later called them his colour beginnings. What reads as pure atmosphere is a real place, the point where the River Wye meets the wide estuary of the Severn on the Welsh border. You could never tell from the paint alone. It was identified by matching a small engraving Turner had made of the same spot back in 1811. For decades the picture stayed unrecorded and unknown. Camille Groult, a Paris collector among the first on the Continent to hunt down British painting, acquired it, and in 1967 it entered the Louvre, one of the very few Turner oils in a French collection.