Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth

One of Turner's most radical paintings, created in 1842 at age sixty-seven. A paddle steamer is barely visible in a swirling vortex of wind, spray, snow, and smoke. Turner dissolves nearly all form into atmospheric energy.

Turner claimed he was lashed to the ship's mast for four hours during the storm. The composition abandons conventional horizon lines, anticipating abstraction by decades.

Critics dismissed it as 'soapsuds and whitewash,' but Ruskin called it 'one of the very grandest statements of sea-motion ever put on canvas.' At the Tate in London.