Uriel Standing in the Sun
by ALLSTON, Washington, Oil on canvas, 248 x 198 cm
Among the likely sources of Turner’s Angel Standing in the Sun was a remarkable picture by the young American history painter Washington Allston, a friend of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Haydon. His Uriel Standing in the Sun, a chromatically brilliant vision of the archangel guarding heaven against Satanic revolt, inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost, had first been seen in London in 1817, and belonged to the Marquess of Stafford, one of Turner’s early patrons.