The New Moon; or, ‘I’ve lost My Boat, You shan’t have Your Hoop’

In 1840 Turner was sixty-five, and at that year's Royal Academy he hung one of his most violent pictures, a slave ship throwing bodies into a burning sea. A few paces away he placed this. It is a low stretch of wet sand at Margate, on the Kent coast, where he spent much of his late life, with a thin new moon rising in a still-bright evening sky. The long comic title records a children's squabble on the beach: one has lost a boat, and won't let the other have a hoop. Critics were baffled that a great painter would bother with such a small joke. The figures are barely more than touches of paint left in the shining light off the water.