Mar agitado com destroços de naufrágio

When Turner died in December 1851 his house in Chelsea and his old gallery in Queen Anne Street held something close to 300 oil paintings that had never left his hands. This canvas, painted around 1840, was one of them. No buyer had turned it down because it had never been offered, and it carries no title of his own. The name the Tate uses describes what is there, a heavy sea and broken timber. His will left the lot to the nation, and after a lawsuit among his relatives that ran for five years the pictures came in as the Turner Bequest in 1856. The date is still given as a range rather than a year, because there is no exhibition and no sale to pin it to.