The Blue Rigi, Sunrise
Tate, London
Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, J. M. W. Turner, 1842. Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 121.9 cm. Tate, London. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Tate, London replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Romanticism
Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth
J. M. W. Turner · 1842
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 91.4 × 121.9 cm
- Held by
- Tate, London
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Romanticism
- Country
- United Kingdom
The painter
J. M. W. Turner
Turner was a barber's son from Covent Garden who entered the Royal Academy schools at fourteen, exhibited there at fifteen, and became a full Academician at twenty-six — about as fast as the English art establishment has ever moved. For the first half of his career he competed openly with the dead: specifically with Claude Lorrain, whose golden harbour scenes he set out to equal and then to surpass, and he left paintings to the nation on the condition that they hang beside Claudes so the comparison could be made. The second half is the one that matters to later painting.
Nearby
Related works
Dido building Carthage
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The Fighting Temeraire
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Norham Castle, Sunrise
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Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway
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What to look at
Turner claimed he had himself lashed to the mast of a steamer for four hours to observe this storm. The story is almost certainly embroidered and possibly invented, but it tells you what he wanted the picture to be taken as: a report from inside the weather rather than a view of it. The composition is a vortex. Everything — spray, snow, smoke, the sea itself — rotates around a dark centre where the paddle steamer is, and the steamer is the only thing in the painting with a straight edge. He works the paint with brush, palette knife and, in places, his fingers, scraping down to the ground in the lightest passages so the white of the preparation does the work of foam. A reviewer called it soapsuds and whitewash. Turner reportedly said he wondered what they thought the sea was like.