Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Rough Sea
Joseph Mallord William Turner British
Not on view
This late, unfinished painting presents very little in the way of identifiable detail. The dark form in the center could be a seawall or a harbor, but what Turner has really captured is a sense of the power of the sea and the merging of water and air at the horizon line. While many viewers disparaged the rough paintings from the Turner Bequest that first surfaced in the early twentieth century, the Bloomsbury art critic, painter, and early Metropolitan Museum curator Roger Fry admired their abbreviation and restraint, noting that Turner could convey the "intimate, imaginative grasp of the tension and stress which underlie the appearance" of his subject "in a few hurried scratches."
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