Pilate Washing his Hands

Turner showed this at the Royal Academy in 1830, and the critics were merciless. One journal called it wretched and abortive. He had aimed it deliberately at the old Dutch masters, pitching his crowd of figures into the deep browns and flickering light of Rembrandt rather than the bright seascapes people expected of him. Pontius Pilate washes his hands at the trial of Christ, the gesture of a man refusing responsibility, half-lost in a press of onlookers. Turner rarely sold the pictures closest to him, and this stayed in his studio to the end. It came to the nation in the Turner Bequest of 1856 and hangs today at Tate Britain.