The Fifth Plague of Egypt

Turner was only 25 when he showed this in 1800, out to prove that a young watercolourist could paint grand biblical history in the manner of Poussin and Claude. There is a famous slip in it. The title says the fifth plague of Egypt, which in the book of Exodus is a disease of livestock, but what Turner actually paints is the seventh, the storm of hail and fire Moses calls down, with a black sky splitting open over a tiny figure of the prophet and the pyramids lost in the gloom behind him. He never corrected the name. The real subject of the picture is the weather, the churning dark and sudden light he would spend the rest of his life chasing, here poured into a story from scripture.