The Sun Setting through Vapour

Turner painted this hazy coast about 1809, when Britain had been at war with Napoleon's France for years and the sea was anything but peaceful. At first it reads as a calm evening: fishermen sorting their catch on the sand, the low sun dissolving into mist and water. Then you notice, far out on the horizon, a Royal Navy ship of the line riding at anchor, and behind it the dark shape of a prison hulk, an old vessel moored to hold prisoners of war. The war is present in the picture, pushed to the edge of a golden haze. Turner's friend and patron Walter Fawkes bought the canvas, and it hung for years in his Yorkshire house.