The Destruction of Sodom

In 1804 Turner opened a gallery in his own house in Marylebone so that he could hang large pictures without the Royal Academy deciding where they went. This canvas is nearly 2.4 metres across, with Lot and his daughters getting clear of the burning city at the right, and the Tate still prints a question mark in front of its date, because there is no proof this is the picture shown there in 1805. It followed the Old Testament disasters he had painted a few years earlier, the fifth and the tenth plagues of Egypt. He never sold it. It came to the nation with everything else left in his studio, under the Turner Bequest accepted in 1856.