Juliette et sa nourrice

Turner exhibited this Venice at dusk in 1836, with St Mark's Square full of people watching fireworks and, on a balcony at the lower right, Juliet and her nurse. Shakespeare had set those two in Verona, but Turner moved them here without apology. A critic in Blackwood's Magazine, John Eagles, was disgusted, calling the painting a jumble of colour thrown together like flour in a tub. The attack reached a 17-year-old admirer named John Ruskin, who was so angry he began writing a defence of Turner. That draft grew, over 18 years, into the five volumes of Modern Painters, one of the most influential works of art criticism in English. The fireworks are still there, dissolving into the yellow sky.