Turner’s seafaring ways — and his blazingly competitive art

Turner’s contemporaries regarded him primarily as a marine painter. This perception extended to his persona, with many who met him commenting on his nautical gait, manner of speaking and other salty characteristics. He frequented ports and coastal parts, relished sailing in storms, was immune to seasickness and famously had himself lashed to the mast to experience the full force of the gale before painting one of his most controversially ‘indistinct’ canvases ‘Snow Storm’. One witness recorded that he ‘somewhat resembled the master of a merchantman’, his first biographer described him as ‘half a sailor’, and he ended his days in unwedded bliss on the Thames in Chelsea with his long-term mistress, a seaman’s widow, Mrs Booth, where he himself was known to the neighbours as ‘Admiral Booth’. More than half of Turner’s pictures were of the sea, yet there has never been a major exhibition devoted to this theme.Turner & the Sea presents as never before the full gamut of the artist’s marine pictures, from the first oil he exhibited, ‘Fishermen at Sea’ (1796), and the first of his works to be engraved and published (in 1807), ‘The Shipwreck’, to ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ (1839) and ‘The Wreck Buoy’ (painted in 1807 and reworked in 1849).

Turner frequented ports and coastal parts, relished sailing in storms and was immune to seasickness

Keelmen heaving in Coal by Moonlight by J.M.W. Turner                                              Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington

By choosing this theme that is central to Turner’s entire career, Christine Riding, who spent five years researching the project, and her co-curator Richard Johns are able to present in a consistently illuminating fashion every important phase of the artist’s development, telling us much about his personality, motivation and the historical background.