La guerra. El exiliado y la lapa

In 1840 Napoleon's remains were brought back from the South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he had died in exile, and reburied in Paris with enormous ceremony. The event was still on people's minds when Turner painted this two years later. He shows the fallen emperor as a small dark figure at sunset, alone on the shore, staring down at a rock limpet, a tiny shellfish clinging to a stone. A British sentry stands guard behind him. The blazing red sky, which Turner called a sea of blood, stands in for all the men lost in his wars, now set against one man brooding over a shell. Turner hung it at the Royal Academy beside a cool, silvery picture called Peace, made after the death at sea of his friend the painter David Wilkie. Critics that year preferred the quiet one.