Sacra Famiglia

In 1802 the Peace of Amiens briefly stopped the war between Britain and France, and Turner, newly elected a full member of the Royal Academy, crossed the Channel for the first time. In Paris he spent his days in the Louvre, which was then hung with pictures Napoleon's armies had brought back from Italy. He filled a sketchbook with notes on them and was caught above all by Titian, whose Death of Saint Peter Martyr had been taken from a church in Venice. This Holy Family, shown at the Royal Academy the next year, came straight out of that looking. An early compositional study shows Turner planning tall trees, floating putti and a pyramid behind the group, and he dropped nearly all of it. The rock arch that replaced the pyramid he borrowed from a Claude Lorrain painting of 1674. He kept the canvas himself, and it reached the nation with the rest of his studio after he died.