L'Étoile du soir

This belongs to Turner's later years, around 1830, when he was in his mid-fifties and increasingly willing to strip a picture down to almost nothing, just sea, sky and a band of wet sand. A boy wades in from the shore and a small dog leaps up to meet him. Above the horizon sits a single point of light, no more than a thick dab of white paint. For a long time people took the canvas for unfinished, though Turner may simply have judged that this much already caught the moment he wanted. The title was not his: it was attached decades later, after his death, once someone noticed that tiny star. The star is the planet Venus, first to shine over the sea at dusk.