Le Soleil de Venise prenant la mer

Turner showed this at the Royal Academy in 1843 and pinned a few lines of his own gloomy verse beside it, warning the little fishing boat, gay with its painted sail, that the fine morning would not hold and the sea was waiting to take it. The boat is a Venetian craft heading out at dawn, its sail lettered Sol di Venezia, the sun of Venice. Turner had visited the city a few times and it loosened his brush completely, so that here water, air and light run into one another and the hull half dissolves in its own reflection. The young critic John Ruskin, then turning Turner into his hero, singled this picture out for praise. Venice by then was ruled from Austria and its centuries as a sea power were over, though Turner kept returning to paint its light.