Castello di Norham, alba

Turner first drew Norham Castle, a ruined fortress on the river Tweed between England and Scotland, as a young man in the 1790s, and it helped make his reputation. He came back to it near the end of his life, around 1845, when he was about 70, and painted this. The castle is barely there. It is a faint blue shape dissolving into an overwhelming wash of morning light, the sun and its reflection in the water almost the only solid things. He never finished it or showed it. The canvas stayed rolled up in his studio, came to the nation with the rest of his estate in 1856, and sat uncatalogued. It was first shown to the public only in 1906, 50 years after it entered the collection.