Narratives of ageing are an important theme in both medical sociology and the sociology of the body. Research on representations of the ageing body typically draws upon such subjects as the paintings of Rembrandt or Victorian literature. In this paper, however, the aim is to demonstrate that some of J. M. W. Turner's pictures contain insightful narratives on ageing, the vulnerability of the body and the nature of our shared humanity. Turner (1775–1851) is widely regarded as Britain's greatest painter and one of the world's great artists. I contend that the central principle of Turner's Romantic art is the arousal of sensation. Although Turner is generally revered as a painter of landscape rather than ‘the body’, the paper maintains that many of Turner's paintings can be read as studies in the vulnerability of the body. It will be shown, for example, that many of Turner's pictures are wonderfully evocative ‘visual poems’ on the universal human experiences of loss, decline, ‘the fallacies of hope’, grief, ageing and death. This paper is, therefore, a cultural case study of ‘the decline narrative’ of ageing.