Regolo

Turner started this in Rome in the winter of 1828, working up a Mediterranean harbour drenched in light. The story behind it is grim. Regulus was a Roman general the Carthaginians sent home to argue for peace, then executed by cutting away his eyelids and leaving him to face the sun. Turner doesn't show that moment. He puts the sun dead centre and lets it burn out the middle of the picture, so the harbour dissolves in glare and you end up squinting into it yourself. In 1837 he brought the canvas to the British Institution in London and, on the varnishing day before the show opened, kept loading white paint into that sun while other painters watched, until it blazed brighter than anything around it.