The Beacon Light

For more than 50 years this painting was kept out of sight. The Welsh collector Gwendoline Davies bought it at auction in 1922, and after her death it came to the National Museum in Cardiff with six other Turners. In 1956 it was rejected as not by Turner, and the standard catalogue of his paintings later described it as a cut-down fragment that another hand had certainly worked on. It stayed in storage. In 2012, for a BBC television investigation, the paint was analysed and found to be the same across the whole canvas and consistent with Turner's own materials. Martin Butlin, co-author of that catalogue, then accepted it, and it went back on display that September. The X-rays also showed a lighthouse painted out on the cliff edge, which moved the likely location from the Needles on the Isle of Wight to the Kent coast near St Margaret's-at-Cliffe, looking toward the South Foreland lighthouse.