Sole che sorge attraverso la foschia

Turner sold this at the end of 1818 to Sir John Leicester, one of his steadiest patrons, for 350 guineas. When Leicester died in 1827 and the collection went to Christie's, Turner turned up at the sale and bought it back himself for 490 guineas, well over what he had been paid for it. He had a use for it. The will he signed in 1831 left it to the nation with a condition attached, that it hang in the National Gallery beside a seaport and a mill by Claude Lorrain, the 17th-century French painter whose light Turner had spent 20 years measuring himself against. It arrived in 1856, after long legal argument over that will. The scene itself is an early morning at low tide, fishermen gutting and selling the catch on the sand, and behind them warships standing in the mist that the title calls vapour.