'Tate Gallery'

J.M.W. Turner spent his last years painting light. Not ships. Not storms. Not history. Light itself — the way it dissolved form, collapsed the boundary between water and sky, made the solid world uncertain. His late paintings were exhibited to bewildered audiences who called them confused, unfinished, the work of a man who had lost his faculties.

He had not lost his faculties. He had abandoned everything that wasn't essential. What remained was luminosity. The Tate houses the Turner bequest — hundreds of these late works — in rooms where people still stand quietly in front of them, feeling something they cannot name.

The gallery is where the world keeps the things it took too long to understand.

This is for the woman whose vision has been ahead of its moment.