Queen Mab’s Cave

Turner was past 70 and near the end when he showed this in 1846, and by then his paintings had dissolved almost entirely into light. The title points to Queen Mab, the tiny fairy of dreams from a speech in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and probably also to a long poem of that name by Shelley. But you would struggle to find a story in it. What is actually on the canvas is a swirl of pale gold and green with the faint suggestion of fairies and a few Welsh ruins, more weather than scene. Critics of the day were baffled by these late works and muttered that the old man had lost his grip. Turner made a smaller second version of the same subject, now in Cleveland.