John Eagles, critic of Blackwood's Magazine, was not wholly unsympathetic to Turner in his review of the 1842 Royal Academy exhibition, commenting that:
on the whole, we do sincerely think Turner improved; there is more of the palpable and intelligible poetry, less obscured by the inconceivable jumble of colours (p. 26).
However, he went on to attack the paintings to which Athenaeum and the Literary Gazette had referred - the Snow Storm, Peace, Burial at Sea, and War, The Exile and the Rock Limpet (see Athenaeum, 14 May 1842 and Literary Gazette, 14 May 1842). He wrote:
Mr. Turner tells us "the author was in this storm on the night the Ariel left Harwich". If so, he must have been very nearly lost then, and quite lost afterwards. His "Peace Burial at Sea" [sic], strange as it is, has yet a dash of his genius. As to his extraordinary performance "War", we understand why it is called the "Exile", but why the "Limpet" is a puzzle quite in accordance with his practice.