The Tenth Plague of Egypt

Turner showed this at the Royal Academy in 1802, the first exhibition after he had been made a full Academician at just 26, young for the honour and out to prove he belonged among the history painters, not only the landscapists. So he took an Old Testament catastrophe, the last of the plagues sent against Egypt, when every firstborn son died in a single night. The Israelite families were spared, and Pharaoh's grief finally freed them. Turner built the scene like the French master Nicolas Poussin, with severe classical buildings under a black sky, and let a storm tear across it to carry the horror. In the foreground mothers sit with dead children in their arms.