Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1981.25.632
Gallery Label:
In later life, J. M. W. Turner spent much of the year living incognito in Chelsea, London, with Sophia Booth, his mistress and housekeeper. Turner had met the widowed Mrs. Booth in Margate and adopted the pseudonym of Captain Booth to preserve his anonymity, passing himself off as a retired seaman. Though ailing physically, he traveled to Switzerland most summers until 1845 and spent a great deal of time in Margate studying the sea. After Turner’s death, a cache of studies of the sea like this one were found in his Chelsea studio. The exact status of these small oil studies is contested, but most of them are uncharacteristically devoid of human presence and are instead pure studies of the power of nature achieved with an almost monochrome palette. Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016