The Storm

The Storm, painted around 1840, is one of Turner's most completely resolved late storm paintings, produced at the height of his mature experimental period when he was pushing the representation of elemental weather to extremes that contemporary criticism struggled to comprehend. His interest in storms was lifelong but the late storms are fundamentally different in kind from earlier depictions: where the Storm at Sea of 1842 or the Snow Storm of 1842 still retained some vestige of specific meteorological incident, these oval and near-square storm studies dissolved the scene into pure energy — vortex composition, violently applied paint, colour and tone pushed to maximum contrast. They anticipated Abstract Expressionism by a century in their insistence that the physical act of painting itself could embody the experience of weather rather than merely depicting it. Critics at the time called them 'painted steam,' a dismissive phrase that Turner accepted with equanimity; later generations would recognise them as among the most radical paintings produced in the nineteenth century.

Turner renders the storm with swirling, vortex-like composition and violent brushwork, dissolving all solid forms into a maelstrom of wind, water, and atmospheric energy.