The Wreck Buoy

By 1849 Turner was 74 and sending almost nothing new to the Royal Academy. So he borrowed back a dark sea piece he had painted around 1807 from Hugh Munro of Novar, a Scottish collector who owned dozens of his canvases, and spent roughly six days reworking it. Munro was said to be horrified, watching a picture he already owned disappear under fresh paint. What came back had a whitened, misty sky and a double rainbow over the water, and a new title taken from the marker that floats above a sunken ship. Ruskin later called it the last oil Turner painted before his hand forgot its cunning. In 1888 it was bought by George Holt, a Liverpool shipowner, and it still hangs in the house he left to the city.