Painted as the companion to 'Undine giving the ring to Masaniello, fisherman of Naples', also exhibited at the

Royal Academy in 1846 (384). This had no accompanying text in the catalogue but 'The Angel standing in the Sun' was accompanied by the following passage from the Book of Revelation XIX, 17-18:

And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God;

That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, both free and bond, both small and great.

and also by a quotation from Samuel Roger's Voyage of Columbus, where, significantly, it has the subtitle 'The Flight of an Angel of Darkness' :

The morning march that flashes to the sun;

The feast of vultures when the day is done.

It appears then that here even the beneficent power of the sun has been transformed into something terrible, indissolubly linked with its opposite, the 'Angel of Darkness'. The relevance of the Neapolitan revolutionary Masaniello is difficult to determine, but he is probably about to be enticed into the sea by the waternymph, who, surrounded in a typically Turneresque phosphorescent bubble, embodies another piece of pessimistic symbolism based on the forces of nature. The two pictures provoked the usual lament from the Athenaeum for 9 May 1846: 'That there is art in them, consummate art, in reconciling to the eye such effusions of all the strongest and most opposing colours of the palette, we freely admit: but we as freely declare our regret, that over such aberrations of talent no controlling influence exerts its genial restraint'. The Spectator for the same date found more, though qualified, praise, calling them 'tours de force that show how nearly the gross materials of the palette can be made to emulate the source of light - of the figures we can only say that Turner seems to have taken leave of form altogether'