One of the most famous bonfires in British art history, the destruction in 1858 of sheaves of erotic paintings by JMW Turner, by the horrified critic John Ruskin, never happened.

Ian Warrell, Turner expert at the Tate, has been poring over thousands of Turner drawings and paintings, matching the survivors with the Victorian inventories and records. He is now convinced there was no bonfire, despite Ruskin's claim that he burned a mass of works of art, sparing only a bundle wrapped in brown paper and neatly labelled "kept as evidence of a failure of mind only".

[Read on @ The Guardian]