Dutch Boats in a Gale Turner

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Dutch Boats in a Gale Turner: Joseph Mallord William Turner

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Joseph Mallord William Turner Oil Painting - Dutch Boats in a Gale Turner

Keywords: Dutch, Boats, Gale, Turner

Work Overview: Dutch Boats in a Gale (The Bridgewater Sea Piece)
Joseph Mallord William Turner
1801
Oil on canvas
163 x 221 cm
National Gallery, London

Dutch boats are shown on course for collision in stormy weather. Dark clouds contribute to the sense of danger. The painting was commissioned by the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater as a companion piece to a 17th-century Dutch seascape in his possession.

The painting is also called The Bridgewater Sea-Piece.

It was in marine painting, then regarded virtually as a branch of landscape, and in mountain subjects that Turner's personal vision was first clearly seen. In both the Old Masters played a part. His first exhibited oil had been a moonlit sea-piece, and it was as a companion to a picture by the Dutch painter Willem van de Velde (1611-93) that the future Duke of Bridgewater commissioned Dutch Boats in a Gale in 1801. Turner responded with a vivid account of churning seas and a sky divided between storm clouds and breaking sunshine, in which all is moving and changing. His vigorous painting of waves, viewed from within their troughs, showed his urgent sense of the medium.

Turner's composition resembles that of his 17th-century predecessor, but Turner added an important dramatic element: the collision of the two ships in the foreground seems unavoidable.

The Turner Gallery, which first appeared several years after the artist's death, was a series of engravings after some of Turner's most popular images, comprising reproductions of a broad selection of oil paintings and a few watercolours. Many of the plates, particularly those after Turner's oil paintings, were new and were thus unsupervised by Turner's hand; others had been executed for earlier series and were reworked for the Turner Gallery.

The series first appeared in parts, published by James S. Virtue, between 1859 and 1861. The plates were accompanied by texts written by Ralph Nicholson Wornum, the Keeper of the National Gallery at that date. Originally there were sixty plates, most of which were engraved on steel by engravers who had been active in producing prints after Turner's work while he was alive. Thus the standard remained high and Rawlinson concedes that in the original edition ‘many plates are of great beauty’ (II 1913, p.356).

The Turner Gallery reappeared in numerous and confusing guises throughout the rest of the century. It was reissued in 1875 by Chatto and Windus, also with a text by Wornum. Rawlinson states that the plates for this edition was also of a high standard since, according to the publishers, ‘the impressions were for the first time printed from the original plates, electrotypes having been used for the Original Edition’. Some of the plates from the original edition were replaced by others which had previously appeared in the Art Journal or the Vernon Gallery. Rawlinson states, however, that the total number of sixty plates remained the same, although there were, in fact, sixty-one plates if the frontispiece of Turner's ‘Self-Portrait’ is included.

Rawlinson is particularly scathing about the later editions: ‘Unfortunately the publishers continued to print and reprint impressions long after they had lost their beauty. They added moreover to the original sixty subjects about sixty others ... the copper-plates of which had been worn out many years before ... Some of these worthless “Reprint” editions appeared as recently as 1880–90’. One later edition of about 1878(?) was published in three volumes by Virtue and contained 120 plates, the additional ones being reprints of engravings after watercolours made for the Southern Coast (see T04370-T04427), History of Richmondshire (see T04439-T04484) and the Ports of England (see T04822-T04837). The text for this edition was provided by W. Cosmo Monkhouse.

Rawlinson only lists sixty-seven plates for the series (his nos.690–750a), omitting those added in the later editions. Unlike other series, he does not catalogue the individual prints in full or give details of their states, but simply lists the various issues of The Turner Gallery, thus making it difficult to ascertain the exact state of an impression. However, as two of the plates in this group are preliminary etchings and the other is a touched proof of a plate that did not appear in the 1875 edition, it is clear that all three impressions must have been intended for the original edition of 1859–61.

Neither of the engravers of these three plates, James Charles Armytage (1802–97) and Arthur Willmore (1814–88), belonged to the ‘Turner School’ of engravers. Armytage, although a prolific engraver of other artists' work, had only produced four plates after Turner during the artist's lifetime, while the three plates executed for the series by Arthur Willmore, brother of James Tibbetts Willmore (see T05189), were the first and only ones that he engraved after Turner.

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Joseph Mallord William Turner

Work Overview