Le Canal de Chichester

Turner painted this quiet stretch of the Chichester Canal for George Wyndham, the 3rd Earl of Egremont, who let the artist roam his estate at Petworth almost as family. It hung low in the Carved Room there, at eye level for anyone seated at dinner. The hour is dusk, the sun nearly gone, the water flat, a single boat becalmed. That astonishing glow may carry a trace of something distant: in 1815 the volcano Tambora erupted in Indonesia, throwing so much ash into the atmosphere that skies across Europe burned unusually red for years afterward. Turner, who chased light more hungrily than any painter of his age, seems to have kept those colours in his eye. The masts here rise almost bare against the sky, catching the last of the light.