Peace – Burial at Sea

In the summer of 1841 the Scottish painter David Wilkie, a friend of Turner's, died of fever on a ship coming home from the Holy Land. The governor of Gibraltar, afraid of contagion, would not let the body come ashore, so Wilkie was buried at sea in the dark, off the Rock. Turner never witnessed it, but he painted it the next year as a memorial, and gave the funeral ship sails of dense black. When someone complained the black was unnatural, he answered that he only wished he could have made it blacker. He hung it beside a companion piece about Napoleon in exile, calling this one Peace and the other War.