It was a masterpiece. Nobody bought it. (re: Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844)

Others, faced with Turner’s competitiveness were less contented. C.R. Leslie was on hand when Turner’s Helvoetsluys, to start with “a grey pictre, beautiful and true, but with no positive colour in any part of it”,...

In 1846 on of his Academy exhibits was a painting called The Angel Standing in the Sun. Turner found this passage for the Academy catalogue in the Book of Revelation: And I saw an angel...