暴风雪:港口外的汽船

Turner exhibited this in 1842, when he was 67 and steam was beginning to push sail off the sea. At the centre, barely, is a paddle steamer firing a distress signal in a blizzard, everything else dissolved into churning snow, spray and smoke. Turner told people he had the sailors lash him to the mast for four hours during a real storm so he could watch it, and that he did not expect to survive. The story is almost certainly untrue, but he wanted the painting believed as first-hand experience. Critics were unkind. One dismissed the whole thing as soapsuds and whitewash. He gave the work a title nearly a paragraph long, naming the ship and the night it left Harwich.