Turner, Friedrich, Aivazovsky and the Romantic Sea
The Fighting Temeraire towed to her last berth at sunset. The five ships that answer a family on the shore in Friedrich’s Stages of Life. The steamer in Turner’s Snow Storm, and the survivors clinging to wreckage in Aivazovsky’s Ninth Wave. The sea as the Romantics felt it, and the ships that carried the feeling.
This chapter of Ships in Paintings holds 76 works. For each one you will find the artist and, wherever the records allow, the date and where the original is kept; then what the ship brings to the picture, and the real ship behind it when there is one. See all 1,331 works on one page.
Marea can build any of these ships as a scale model, with the maximum detail the scale permits, finished to be inspected. We can build her as the artist saw her: the same rig, the same sails set, the same colours. It isn’t a copy of a painting. It’s the ship, stepping out of it.
This database was put together by Ai Refloat™, Marea’s own artificial intelligence, from the records of museums, maritime archives and published sources. Ai Refloat is still young & like any teenager, it can be a little volatile and unpredictable at times, but above all, it is learning fast. So this list may well contain mistakes and we welcome the input of everyone who knows these paintings, photographs and ships better than we do: listening, correcting and learning is one of the many ways we work towards perfection in this craft.
When no free image of a work exists, we show instead the museum or the place where the original can be seen.
Have you spotted a mistake? Tell us which painting, photograph or ship, and we will amend it accordingly. Tell us here
The works
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Ships at the entrance to the port of Palermo by night Unnamed
Entrance to the Port of Palermo by Moonlight, 1769
Artist Joseph Vernet (1714 to 1789)
Where to see it State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (ГЭ-1764)
Medium Oil on canvas
Signed 'J. Vernet f 1769' and shown at the Salon that year, this is one of Vernet's night pieces. On the left, people warm themselves at a fire beneath the tower of Palermo's harbour fortress; on the right the silhouettes of ships stand out against a sea lit by a moon hung almost at the centre of the sky. The painting passed through collections at Montreuil and Aix-en-Provence before Alexander I of Russia bought it in 1803, and it has a companion in the Hermitage, a view of the surroundings of Reggio in Calabria.
The vessels Unnamed ships, seen in silhouette at the entrance to the port of Palermo.
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Ships in a fictionalised seaport by moonlight Unnamed
A Seaport by Moonlight (La Nuit; un port de mer au clair de lune), 1771
Artist Joseph Vernet (1714 to 1789)
Where to see it Musée du Louvre, Paris (INV 8334)
Medium Oil on canvas
Painted for Madame du Barry's pavilion at Louveciennes as one of four overdoors of the times of day, this is Vernet's night. Fishermen gather round a fire on the shore while others fish, and the moon dominates the sky, its pale light lying on the small waves and among the clouds. The whole picture turns on two lights, the burning orange of the fire on the right and the cold light of the night on the left. Shown at the Salon of 1773 and widely engraved, it was seized by the state at the Revolution from the Comte d'Artois.
The vessels The seaport is fictionalised and the vessels are unnamed.
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Fishing boat by moonlight off the Isle of Wight Unnamed
Fishermen at Sea, exhibited 1796
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Tate, London (T01585)
Medium Oil on canvas
This was long considered the first oil painting Turner showed at the Royal Academy, in 1796, when he had just turned twenty-one. A small fishing boat rides a rough sea by night off the Isle of Wight, its flickering lamp a warm spark against the cold light of the moon. The chalk formations beyond, long called the Needles, make the danger plain. It sets the fragility of human life against the sublime power of nature, and the frail boat carries the whole human part of it.
The vessels An unnamed small fishing boat worked at night off the Isle of Wight.
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Dutch boats in a gale Unnamed
Dutch Boats in a Gale ('The Bridgewater Sea Piece'), 1801
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it On loan to the National Gallery, London, from The Capricorn Foundation (L297)
Medium Oil on canvas
Francis Egerton, Duke of Bridgewater, the coal and canal magnate, owned a storm piece by Willem van de Velde the Younger and commissioned the young Turner to paint its pendant. Turner answered in reverse: his boats lean the other way, his clouds come in from the other side, his sea is far angrier, and two heavy Dutch boats seem about to collide as their crews fight to avoid each other. He was paid £250, the most he had yet received for an oil, and crowds clustered round it at the Royal Academy. It is the young painter measuring himself against the Dutch masters.
The vessels Unnamed Dutch sailing boats driven by a gale; they are not individual named vessels.
Sources National Gallery · Wikipedia
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Ships bearing up for anchorage Unnamed
Ships Bearing up for Anchorage ('The Egremont Sea Piece'), exhibited 1802
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Tate, London, on display at Petworth House, West Sussex (T03868)
Medium Oil on canvas
Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1802, the first exhibition after Turner was elected a full Academician, this was the first picture he showed signed J. M. W. Turner rather than William. Big ships bear up into the wind to come to anchor while smaller craft plunge across a heavy sea under a moving sky. The Earl of Egremont bought it, and it still hangs at Petworth House, his home, on loan from the Tate. It is the confident young master at full sail, showing he could command a whole anchorage.
The vessels Sailing ships of the period turning up into the wind to anchor in an open roadstead; the vessels are not individually identified.
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
English cross-Channel packet and French fishing boats Unnamed
Calais Pier, with French Poissards preparing for Sea: an English Packet arriving, 1803
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it National Gallery, London (NG472)
Medium Oil on canvas
On 15 July 1802, on his first trip abroad, Turner crossed from Dover to Calais in a packet of this kind and noted in his sketchbook that the landing had nearly swamped him. The next year he put that crossing on one of his largest and most complex sea pictures. The packet, laden with passengers under a British flag, comes in towards the pier while French fishing boats head out into the same rough sea and agitated women watch from the windswept pier. A single shaft of sun lights a white sail. Critics mocked the thick paint of the waves; Ruskin later saw in it the first signs of Turner's colossal power.
“Our landing at Calais. Nearly swampt.”
The vessels A cross-Channel packet of the kind Turner took from Dover to Calais, surrounded by small French fishing boats. The vessels are not individually named.
Sources National Gallery · Wikipedia
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Small boats going to the aid of a foundering ship Unnamed
The Shipwreck, 1805
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Tate, London (N00476)
Medium Oil on canvas
Shown in Turner's own gallery in Queen Anne Street around 1805, The Shipwreck is an important example of the sublime in British painting. A larger ship founders in the background while small boats, crammed with survivors and rescuers, fight a mountainous sea in the foreground. It probably records the loss of the East Indiaman Earl of Abergavenny off Weymouth that February. What the boats bring to the picture is courage: small hulls holding a human line against the whole weight of the water.
The vessels The large vessel is unnamed; the painting has been linked to the Earl of Abergavenny, an East Indiaman that foundered off Weymouth, Dorset, on 4 February 1805. The rescuers are open fishing boats.
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Dutch fishing boats and distant warships Unnamed
Sun rising through Vapour: Fishermen cleaning and selling Fish, before 1807
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it National Gallery, London (NG479)
Medium Oil on canvas
Early morning: fishermen unload their catch from a boat beached high and dry on the shore while a pale sun has yet to burn off the haze, and large warships hang in it like ghosts. The sea is glassy, a mirror for the light. Turner learned these boats and figures from Cuyp and Van de Velde, and when he showed it at his own gallery in 1810 it was called Dutch Boats. He bought it back after its first owner died, and his will asked for it to hang in the National Gallery beside Claude, where it hangs today.
The vessels A fishing boat beached on the shore, with large warships lying offshore in the haze. None is an identified vessel.
Sources National Gallery · Wikipedia
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the National Gallery, London, where the original is kept. Photo: Ray in Manila, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Guardship at the Nore with fishing boats Unnamed
Sheerness as seen from the Nore, 1808
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Medium Oil on canvas
Looking from the Nore towards Sheerness, where the Thames meets the Medway, Turner sets a Royal Navy guardship in silhouette against the rising sun, while in the foreground a small sailing boat passes a group of fishermen. It was painted during the Napoleonic Wars, and the warship stands guard over the smaller craft. Turner showed it in his own gallery in Queen Anne Street in 1808, and The Examiner called it one of the finest sea pieces ever painted by a British artist.
“one of the finest sea-pieces ever painted by a British artist”
The vessels A Royal Navy guardship off Sheerness, a naval dockyard where the Thames meets the Medway; the ship is not named.
Sources Wikipedia
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
The Saltash water ferry and Tamar boats Unnamed
Saltash with the Water Ferry, Cornwall, 1811
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (89.15.9)
Medium Oil on canvas
On his summer journey to western England in 1811 Turner stopped at Saltash, a historic Cornish market town across the Tamar from Devonport and Plymouth with a long-established ferry, and painted its daily commerce: boats, packhorses and people gathered along the muddy shore. Nothing heroic happens, which is the point. In 1852 Ruskin saw in it what the mind sees when it looks for poetry in humble actual life. The ferry and its boats carry that poetry.
“what the mind sees when it looks for poetry in humble actual life”
The vessels The Saltash ferry across the Tamar and the working boats around it; none is individually identified.
Sources The Met
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
A three-masted sailing ship in mist Unnamed
Sailing Ship (Segelschiff), c. 1815
Artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774 to 1840)
Where to see it Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz (inv. 215)
Medium Oil on canvas
Here a ship is the whole subject. A three-master comes almost straight towards us out of a warm golden haze, her sails dark against the light, pennants streaming, the sea barely suggested beneath her. There is no shore and no figure, only the ship emerging from mist. It is less a record of a particular vessel than a portrait of a ship as an apparition, arriving from somewhere beyond the visible world.
The vessels An unnamed three-masted square-rigged ship under full sail.
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Boats on the shore facing Greifswald Unnamed
Greifswald in Moonlight (Greifswald im Mondschein), 1817
Artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774 to 1840)
Where to see it Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo (NG.M.00387)
Medium Oil on canvas
From a rocky shore strung with fishing nets on upright stakes, the eye crosses still water to the moonlit towers of Greifswald, Friedrich's birthplace, painted in reverse. The museum points out a rowing boat approaching and two skiffs lying tilted on the beach, all lit by a full moon glimpsed through cloud. The nets make a fence between us and the town, which floats on the horizon like a dream: for Friedrich the medieval city stood for the yearning for Paradise. The humble boats are the only way across.
“The fishing nets act as a fence between the viewer and the city, which lies as a dreamscape on the horizon.”
The vessels Small unnamed boats of the shore: a rowing boat coming in and two skiffs drawn up on the beach beside fishing nets hung on stakes.
Sources Nasjonalmuseet · Wikipedia
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Three sailing ships at anchor off a flat shore Unnamed
Ships at Anchor (Schiffe auf Reede, Strandbild), c. 1817
Artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774 to 1840)
Medium Oil on canvas
Three ships ride at anchor off a low, marshy shore, their bare masts standing like crosses against a sky raked with long streaks of cloud. In the foreground stand dead stakes and a broken fence, and a pale light glows low in the sky between the ships. The stillness is almost total. The ships are neither arriving nor departing, and the picture holds them in that moment of rest.
The vessels Three unnamed square-rigged ships lying at anchor with their sails furled.
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Two white sailing boats on the Baltic Unnamed
Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (Kreidefelsen auf Rügen), c. 1818
Artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774 to 1840)
Where to see it Kunst Museum Winterthur, Reinhart am Stadtgarten, Winterthur
Medium Oil on canvas
Painted after Friedrich's honeymoon on Rügen in the summer of 1818, the picture frames the sea between glaring white chalk cliffs and two leaning beeches, with three figures in town clothes gazing out in wonder. The thin man in the middle is usually read as the painter and the woman in red as his wife Caroline. Far out on the calm, sunlit water sail two tiny white boats; the further one comes from studies of sailing ships he drew on that honeymoon. Interpreters have seen in them the soul opening to eternal life. Small as they are, the boats give the vast view its direction and its longing.
The vessels Small sailing boats of the kind Friedrich sketched on Rügen in August 1818; the vessels are not identified.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikipedia (DE)
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
The Dort packet boat from Rotterdam Unnamed
Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed, 1818
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Paul Mellon Collection (B1977.14.77)
Medium Oil on canvas
Turner drew Dordrecht in mid-September 1817 and brought back this great calm, often called the finest example of the influence of Dutch marine painting on his work, and perhaps a riposte to the success of Callcott's Entrance to the Pool of London. The packet boat from Rotterdam lies becalmed in the harbour of Dordrecht, the old town behind. The Morning Chronicle hailed it at the Royal Academy in 1818, and Walter Fawkes bought it for 500 guineas and hung it at Farnley Hall. After the storms, this is Turner showing that stillness and light can carry a ship just as powerfully.
“one of the most magnificent pictures ever exhibited, and does honour to the age”
The vessels The packet boat that ran between Rotterdam and Dordrecht, shown becalmed; not an individually named vessel.
Sources britishart.yale.edu · Wikipedia
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Drawing
A first-rate ship of the line taking in stores Unnamed
A First Rate Taking in Stores, 1818
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it The Higgins, Bedford
Medium Watercolour
Turner painted this watercolour in 1818 for his patron Walter Fawkes. A Royal Navy first-rate, a great ship of the line, is taking naval stores aboard, and her hull is bathed in sunlight against the darker shadows around it, so that she seems to rise out of the sea like a cliff. It shows a man-of-war not in battle but in the everyday business of the fleet, the quiet work of supply that kept a warship at sea. The Higgins in Bedford acquired it in 1953.
The vessels A Royal Navy first-rate ship of the line; the ship is not named.
Sources Wikipedia
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Higgins, Bedford, where the original is kept. Photo: M J Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Sailing boat carrying a young couple Unnamed
On the Sailing Boat (Auf dem Segler), c. 1818
Artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774 to 1840)
Where to see it State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (GE 9773)
Medium Oil on canvas
In 1818 Friedrich married Caroline Bommer, and the couple travelled to his Baltic homeland near Greifswald. This picture followed: a couple seen from behind, hand in hand in the bow of a sailing boat, gliding over smooth water towards a dreamlike city rising in the haze. The bow, the rigging and the forward motion carry the whole meaning, the ship of life heading for the harbour of marriage. The Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia bought it in the artist's Dresden studio in 1820.
The vessels A gaff-rigged sailing boat seen only by its bow and rigging; not an identified vessel.
Sources Wikipedia (DE)
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Two-masted sailing ship at the mouth of the Ryck, Greifswald Unnamed
The Port of Greifswald (Greifswalder Hafen), c. 1818 to 1820
Artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774 to 1840)
Where to see it Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (A II 356)
Medium Oil on canvas
Friedrich returns to Greifswald, his birthplace, at the point where the little river Ryck opens into the Greifswald Bodden. At the centre stands a two-masted ship, a kind of protagonist of the canvas, its yards forming the triangle and cross that recur in his work, while small boats move in a light wind and the towers of the town rise from the hazy horizon. The tall format and the warm evening light give most of the picture to the sky. Werner Hofmann read in Friedrich's harbour pictures associations of shelter, peace and the evening of life, and the resting ship holds all of them.
The vessels An unnamed two-masted sailing ship at the mouth of the Ryck; a drawing by Friedrich of 1818 shows a very similar ship placed at the centre.
Sources Wikipedia (DE) · Wikipedia
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Sailing ships off Rügen Unnamed
A Seascape: the Coast of Rügen seen in the Evening Light after a Stormy Day, 1818
Artist Johan Christian Dahl (1788 to 1857)
Where to see it Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (KMS6852)
Medium Oil on canvas
Dahl crossed the Baltic in early September 1818 and painted this seascape from memory in his Dresden studio that autumn, for the Danish Prince Christian Frederik, later King Christian VIII, who paid for it in February 1819. The storm has passed and the coast of Rügen lies in the red of evening while a sailing ship rides the Baltic. The picture later passed to Frederik VII, who gave it at once to Countess Danner. The ship carries the calm that follows a storm, the moment every sailor waits for.
The vessels A sailing ship on the Baltic off the coast of Rügen; not individually identified.
Image: Johan Christian Dahl, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Dutch orange merchant aground on the bar Unnamed
Entrance of the Meuse: Orange-Merchant on the Bar, Going to Pieces; Brill Church bearing S. E. by S., Masensluys E. by S., 1819
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Tate, London (N00501)
Medium Oil on canvas
A Dutch merchantman carrying oranges has run aground on a sandbank at the mouth of the Meuse and, as the title says, is going to pieces, with Brielle church on the horizon. The title reads like a pilot's bearings, compass points and all, so long and winding that it has been said to read like three paintings at least. It is also a pun, for the orange of the cargo is the orange of the House of Orange then reigning over the Netherlands. Tragedy and wit share one sea.
The vessels A Dutch merchant ship carrying oranges, stranded on the bar at the entrance of the Meuse near Brielle and Maassluis; she is not otherwise identified.
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Elbe cargo barge with a small boat Unnamed
River Bank in Fog (Flussufer im Nebel), also called Elbe Ship in Early Morning Fog, c. 1821
Artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774 to 1840)
Where to see it Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne
Medium Oil on canvas
A flowering meadow fills the foreground, painted as if Friedrich sat in the grass; beyond it an Elbe cargo barge with a small boat drifts downstream through morning mist, three men labouring aboard, no sail set. A critic at the Dresden Academy exhibition of 1822 complained the fog lay so heavily that the artist's famous name was the only ray of sun in it. Helmut Börsch-Supan read the barge as human life carried by the river towards its mouth and death, and the fog as the troubles of life dissolved by the sun. The small vessel becomes the whole meaning of the picture.
The vessels An unnamed Elbe cargo barge without sails, drifting downstream near Dresden and kept on course by a man at the rudder, with a small boat alongside.
Sources Wikipedia (DE) · Wikipedia
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
A partially dismasted felucca in a storm Unnamed
Joseph Vernet Tied to a Mast Studying the Effects of the Storm (Joseph Vernet attaché à un mât étudie les effets de la tempête), 1822
Artist Horace Vernet (1789 to 1863)
Where to see it Musée Calvet, Avignon
Medium Oil on canvas
Horace Vernet paints the family legend: his grandfather Joseph, sailing from Italy to begin the Ports of France commissioned by Louis XV, has himself lashed to the foremast of a partly dismasted felucca so that he can watch the storm, sketchbook in hand. The incident may never have happened, but the grandson made it the image of a painter who faced the sea to learn it. The canvas was a government commission first meant for Géricault, and at the Salon of 1822, after Vernet withdrew his other entries, it was the only picture of his on show.
The vessels The felucca was a small Mediterranean craft; here she is shown partly dismasted in a violent storm. The episode may be apocryphal.
Sources Wikipedia
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Two sailing ships coming in to anchor Unnamed
Moonrise over the Sea (Mondaufgang am Meer), 1822
Artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774 to 1840)
Where to see it Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Medium Oil on canvas
A man in old German dress and two women sit on a great boulder on a dark stony shore and watch the full moon rise over the sea. Two sailing ships are coming in towards them, or already lie in the roads, the nearer one taking in her sails. The arriving ships give the quiet scene its pulse: the long wait on the shore, the promise of arrival. For Helmut Börsch-Supan the moon is a symbol of Christ and the approaching ships stand for lives drawing to their close. The banker Joachim Heinrich Wilhelm Wagener commissioned it with a pendant of a village at morning.
The vessels Two sailing ships painted as types rather than identifiable vessels.
Sources Wikipedia (DE)
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Elbe sailing boats seen from the painter's studio Unnamed
Woman at a Window (Frau am Fenster), 1822
Artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774 to 1840)
Where to see it Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Medium Oil on canvas
A woman in a green dress, by contemporary account the painter's wife Caroline, leans at the window of Friedrich's bare Dresden studio at An der Elbe 26. Through the open lower casement we see the masts and rigging of two sailing boats and a row of tall poplars along the Elbe; the nearest mast runs on up into the panes above her head. Friedrich painted the boats and trees much closer to the window than they could really have been. In a room stripped of almost everything, the rigging carries the whole longing of the picture: the idea of departure, seen from a room one does not leave.
The vessels Two unnamed sailing boats on the Elbe below Friedrich's studio in Dresden.
Sources Wikipedia (DE) · Wikipedia
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
A small sailing boat lying among rocks on a moonlit shore Unnamed
Northern Sea in the Moonlight (Nordsee im Mondlicht), 1823 to 1824
Artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774 to 1840)
Where to see it National Gallery Prague (O 8669)
Medium Oil on canvas
Painted in the years around The Sea of Ice, this is a northern coast at its most silent. A break in heavy clouds lets the moon light a still sea, stacks of rock and a far line of cliffs, and in the foreground a small boat lies among the stones, her mast leaning. There is no figure. The little vessel is all that speaks of human life in a scene of rock, water and cloud, and its tilted mast gives the picture a quiet note of loss.
The vessels An unnamed small sailing boat lying on a rocky shore.
Sources Wikidata · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Coal brigs on Brighton beach Unnamed
Brighton Beach, with Colliers, 1824
Artist John Constable (1776 to 1837)
Where to see it Victoria and Albert Museum, London (591-1888)
Medium Oil on paper
Constable first came to Brighton in 1824 for the sake of his wife's health and was little taken with the resort, whose fishing boat subjects he thought hackneyed. So he painted working ships instead: colliers on the beach near the head of the Chain Pier, dark against a bright summer evening sky. On the back he noted the receding tide, the wet beach and the very white and golden light, and he later sent the sketch to his friend John Fisher. The coal ships, dark and workaday, anchor the fresh, breezy light around them.
“Very lovely Evening - looking Eastward”
The vessels Colliers were coal ships; Constable's earlier pencil note on the sketch reads simply 'Colliers on the beach'. The vessels are not identified.
Sources V&A
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Sailing boats and harbour craft at Dieppe Unnamed
The Harbour of Dieppe (Changement de Domicile), exhibited 1825, dated 1826
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it The Frick Collection, New York (1914.1.122)
Medium Oil on canvas
Turner knew Dieppe from two visits but built this harbour in his London studio. Boats crowd the quays, sails hang in golden air, and hundreds of figures go about their business around a central core of sun reflected on the water, in the manner of Claude's great seaports. He left out the steamboats that already used the port. Critics thought such golden tones belonged to a southern climate, not the Channel, but that is its point: a working harbour transfigured by glow.
The vessels Fishing and coastal sailing craft of the Normandy port of Dieppe in the 1820s. The vessels are not individually named.
Sources collections.frick.org · frick.org
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Fishing boats on Brighton beach Unnamed
Chain Pier, Brighton, 1826 to 1827
Artist John Constable (1776 to 1837)
Where to see it Tate, London (N05957)
Medium Oil on canvas
This was the largest and most important work from Constable's visits to Brighton, where his wife went to recover her health, and one of his six-footers, shown at the Royal Academy in 1827. With a storm about to break, fishermen work on the beach beside a boat drawn up with her brown sail still set, while out on the rough sea sailing boats run past the new Chain Pier, opened in 1823. Behind rise the new hotels and residences of the resort. The boats give the fashionable scene its salt and its truth.
The vessels Brighton fishing boats, one drawn up on the beach and others sailing offshore; none is individually identified.
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Rhine packet boat arriving at Cologne Unnamed
Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet Boat: Evening, exhibited 1826
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it The Frick Collection, New York (Henry Clay Frick Bequest)
Medium Oil on canvas
Shown at the Royal Academy a year after his Dieppe, this is Cologne on the Rhine at evening, the tower and spire of Gross St Martin piercing the sky above walls, towers and the customs house. In the foreground everything seems suspended: labouring women in peasant dress, an abandoned fishing contraption, time standing still. Then the boats arrive, the packet of the title and a ferry carrying women tourists to the shore, about to break the spell. A critic of the day could not shut his eyes to its wonderful skill, lightness and brilliancy.
“it is impossible to shut our eyes to the wonderful skill, and to the lightness and brilliancy”
The vessels A Rhine packet boat and a passenger ferry; neither is individually named.
Sources frick.org
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Market boat on the Scheldt Unnamed
A Market Boat on the Scheldt, 1826
Artist Clarkson Stanfield (1793 to 1867)
Where to see it Victoria and Albert Museum, London (FA.189)
Medium Oil on panel
Stanfield joined a South Shields collier as a boy, was pressed into the Royal Navy and sailed to China in an East Indiaman before he made his name painting scenery at Drury Lane, and he never lost a sailor's eye. Here a rowing boat crowded with figures and goods crosses the Scheldt while larger vessels lie beyond. He signed and dated it on a barrel in the boat, C STANFIELD 1826, in the years when he was still best known for theatre scenery.
The vessels A rowing market boat carrying people and goods on the Scheldt, with larger boats behind; none is identified.
Image: Clarkson Stanfield, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Small sailing boat off an imaginary port Unnamed
Port Ruysdael, 1826 to 1827
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Paul Mellon Collection (B1977.14.80)
Medium Oil on canvas
There is no port called Ruysdael. Turner invented it as a tribute to the Dutch Golden Age painter Jacob van Ruisdael and showed the picture at the Royal Academy in 1827. A small sailing boat works across a stormy sea under heavy cloud, near a harbour wall. The boat is the whole drama of the picture: a single hull and sail against wind and water, painted as a conversation with the old masters of the sea. Turner returned to the idea in 1844 with Fishing Boats bringing a Disabled Ship into Port Ruysdael, now at Tate.
The vessels A generic small sailing boat of the kind painted by the seventeenth-century Dutch marine painters. The port is imaginary and no real vessel is intended.
Sources collections.britishart.yale.edu · Wikipedia
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Royal Yacht Club racing yachts Unnamed
East Cowes Castle, the Seat of John Nash, Esq.; the Regatta Starting for their Moorings, 1827 to 1828
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Victoria and Albert Museum, London (FA.210)
Medium Oil on canvas
In the summer of 1827 Turner stayed with the architect John Nash at his neo Gothic castle at East Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, and watched the Royal Yacht Club races. This is one of two canvases he painted for Nash: sailing boats and rowing boats crowd the water, spectators line the shore, and the castle floats faintly in the distance. Ruskin called it one of the highest pieces of intellectual art existing. It is Turner painting leisure and elegance on the water, all light and movement.
“one of the highest pieces of intellectual art existing”
The vessels Racing yachts of the Royal Yacht Club, founded at Cowes in 1812, with attendant rowing boats; individual yachts are not identified.
Sources V&A
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
A full-rigged ship at anchor off Vækerø Unnamed
View from Vækerø near Christiania (Utsikt fra Vækerø nær Christiania), 1827
Artist Johan Christian Dahl (1788 to 1857)
Where to see it National Gallery of Art, Washington (1999.99.1)
Medium Oil on canvas
Signed and dated 'Dahl Januar 1827', this is a Norwegian evening painted in winter. Dahl, who had left Bergen for the Copenhagen Academy in 1811 and learned from Ruisdael and Everdingen, looks across the fjord near Christiania under a heavy sky with the moon behind the clouds: rocks and a hut in the foreground, fishing nets hung to dry on a line of stakes, a couple standing by the water, and beyond them a full-rigged ship lying at anchor. The ship is the link between the quiet shore and the wide world beyond the fjord.
The vessels An unnamed three-masted, full-rigged ship lying at anchor off Vækerø near Christiania.
Sources National Gallery of Art · Wikidata
Image: Johan Christian Dahl, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Fishing boats returning to harbour at dusk Unnamed
Ships in the Harbour at Evening (Schiffe im Hafen am Abend), 1828
Artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774 to 1840)
Where to see it Galerie Neue Meister, Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Gal. Nr. 2645)
Medium Oil on canvas
Evening in a harbour: sailing boats come in from the open sea in a line that seems to go on for ever, while the dark water keeps the last light of the setting sun and a thin crescent moon hides behind veils of cloud in a blue violet sky. Friedrich painted it for the collector Maximilian Speck von Sternburg, whose name is lettered on a rowing boat drawn up in the foreground, once mistaken for the artist's signature. That little boat has reached the end of its voyage, a ship of life at rest. Yet the mood is calm, not despairing.
The vessels Probably fishing boats, as the fish traps behind them suggest, painted as types; the only name on a hull is the patron's, Maxn. v. Speck, on the rowing boat in front.
Sources skd-online-collection.skd.museum · Wikipedia (DE)
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
A fisherman's boat coming in to land Unnamed
Mother and Child by the Sea, 1830
Artist Johan Christian Dahl (1788 to 1857)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2007.164.2)
Medium Oil on canvas
A tiny picture, only 16 by 21 centimetres, and one of the tenderest in this collection. Writing to its first owner, Dahl explained that the figures on the shore were the wife and child of a fisherman on the approaching boat. The boat is the whole emotional charge: the waiting, the homecoming, the fear that it might not come. The subject may have touched Dahl deeply. His own father was a fisherman, and two of his children died in the year before he completed it.
“the wife and child of a fisherman on the approaching boat”
The vessels A small fishing boat returning to shore; not an identified vessel.
Image: Johan Christian Dahl; photo Derbrauni, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Steamer off Staffa Unnamed
Staffa, Fingal's Cave, 1831 to 1832
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Paul Mellon Collection (B1978.43.14)
Medium Oil on canvas
Turner visited Scotland in 1831, and back in his studio in Queen Anne Street he painted Staffa not as a study of the famous basalt cave but as weather: a small steamboat beats along below the cliffs, its smoke streaming back low across a dark sea, while the sun, close to the horizon, burns through the rain cloud. It was shown at the Royal Academy in 1832. The steamer is the only human thing in the picture, and it carries the romance of the sea by steam rather than sail.
The vessels An unnamed paddle steamer, the kind that carried visitors to Staffa; the vessel herself is not identified.
Sources britishart.yale.edu · Wikipedia
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
City of Utrecht Named ship
Helvoetsluys: the City of Utrecht, 64, going to Sea, 1832
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, Tokyo
Medium Oil on canvas
A Dutch 64, the City of Utrecht, goes to sea off Hellevoetsluis. At the Royal Academy of 1832 the picture hung beside Constable's Opening of Waterloo Bridge, a canvas he had worked on for more than a decade, and on varnishing day the two painters had one of the most famous exchanges in British art. The warship sailed straight into the story of their rivalry. In 2019 the canvas came from Tokyo to hang beside Constable's once again at the Royal Academy.
The real ship Turner's title names her as the City of Utrecht, 64, a ship of the line of the Dutch navy, going to sea near Hellevoetsluis.
Sources fujibi.or.jp · Wikipedia
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Wrecked sailing ship on the Norwegian coast Unnamed
Shipwreck on the Coast of Norway, 1832
Artist Johan Christian Dahl (1788 to 1857)
Where to see it Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo (NG.M.01626)
Medium Oil on canvas
Dahl was the son of a modest fisherman in Bergen, and he made his career far from home in Dresden, where he worked up his larger pictures in the studio. Here, as the title says, a ship has been wrecked on the coast of Norway. Years earlier he had told his patron Prince Christian Frederik that above all he was representing nature in all its freedom and wildness. This picture is that credo turned to the sea: the wreck as the measure of the sea's power, and a homeland seen from afar.
“most of all I am representing nature in all its freedom and wildness”
The vessels An unnamed sailing vessel wrecked on the Norwegian coast; the painting does not record a specific wreck.
Sources Nasjonalmuseet · Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Johan Christian Dahl, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Dutch boat carrying the painter Jan van Goyen Unnamed
Antwerp: Van Goyen Looking Out for a Subject, 1833
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it The Frick Collection, New York
Medium Oil on canvas
Turner imagines the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jan van Goyen out in the harbour off Antwerp, sketching from a vessel as he looks for his next subject, with the cathedral far in the distance. It is a painter's tribute to a painter, shown at the Royal Academy in 1833 beside his Canaletti Painting, which paid the same compliment to Canaletto. The boat is a floating studio. It was once owned by the whaling magnate Elhanan Bicknell and came to the Frick Collection with Henry Clay Frick's bequest in 1919.
The vessels A Dutch vessel in the harbour off Antwerp; it is imagined rather than recorded.
Sources Wikipedia
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Rotterdam ferry boat with a Dutch warship beyond Unnamed
Rotterdam Ferry-Boat, 1833
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it National Gallery of Art, Washington
Medium Oil on canvas
One of the Dutch themed seascapes Turner produced in the early 1830s, shown at the Royal Academy in 1833. A ferry boat crosses the water off Rotterdam while a warship of the Dutch navy stands in the background. The little ferry gives the picture its human scale; the warship its weight. At fifty-eight Turner was still answering the Dutch marine painters of the past. The picture has been in the National Gallery of Art in Washington since 1970.
The vessels A ferry boat off Rotterdam and a warship of the Dutch navy; neither is identified by name.
Sources Wikipedia
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Fishing boats on the sands below St Michael's Mount Unnamed
St Michael's Mount, Cornwall, c. 1834
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Victoria and Albert Museum, London (FA.209)
Medium Oil on canvas
The island and its medieval monastery rise dramatically behind, while in the foreground fisherfolk work among boats on the sands. Turner took the view from sketches of 1811 but raised the height of the Mount. At the Royal Academy of 1834 the Spectator found his painting unsubstantial and visionary beside Callcott's, and twenty years later Waagen admired its poetical charm. It was probably painted as a pair to Line Fishing, off Hastings. The beached boats and the busy shore anchor the visionary Mount to ordinary Cornish life.
“The bold, precipitous rock, and the manner in which it is lighted, give this picture a poetical charm”
The vessels Cornish fishing boats on the sands below St Michael's Mount; not individually identified.
Sources V&A
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Two xebecs and the frigate Syrène Named ship
Gale in the Roadstead of Algiers, 7 January 1831 (Coup de vent sur la rade d’Alger, 1831), 1835
Artist Théodore Gudin (1802 to 1880)
Where to see it Musée national de la Marine, Paris (deposit of the Musée du Louvre)
Medium Oil on canvas
Gudin sailed with the Algiers expedition of 1830 as one of its official painters, and this vast canvas, more than four metres wide, records an episode from the winter that followed. On 7 January 1831 French sailors in two xebecs, heading across the roadstead of Algiers for the frigate Syrène, were caught by a violent gale. One xebec fills the foreground, pitching in the waves, the faces and postures of the men at her stern full of alarm; behind, the second xebec and the frigate herself are in trouble too. It was shown at the Salon of 1835.
The real ship The xebecs were small vessels carrying French sailors across the roadstead of Algiers; the Syrène was a French frigate of the squadron there in January 1831.
Sources Wikipedia (FR)
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Musée national de la Marine, Paris, where the original is kept. Photo: Freepenguin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Tyne keels and collier ships Unnamed
Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, 1835
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it National Gallery of Art, Washington, Widener Collection (1942.9.86)
Medium Oil on canvas
On the Tyne between North and South Shields, keelmen work through the night loading coal onto their flat-bottomed keels, which carry it out to the bigger ships bound for London. Turner lights the scene with cool moonlight, warm torch fire and shimmering reflections, so that labour and industry become something close to wonder. Henry McConnel, a Manchester textile manufacturer, commissioned it as a companion to his Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore. A critic of the day complained it was neither night nor day, which is exactly the spell the picture casts.
The vessels Keels were small flat-bottomed boats that took coal across the Tyne to bigger ships, often bound for London.
Sources National Gallery of Art
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Hastings inshore fishing boats Unnamed
Line Fishing, off Hastings, c. 1835
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Victoria and Albert Museum, London (FA.207)
Medium Oil on canvas
Inshore fishermen work a baited line in the Channel off Hastings. Turner had drawn the view in his second Hastings sketchbook in 1816 and made a watercolour of it in 1818; almost twenty years later he returned to it in oil for the Royal Academy of 1835, composing the foreground boats afresh and pushing the land further away. While reviewers that year dwelt on his Burning of the Houses of Parliament, the Spectator called this a beautiful marine piece. John Sheepshanks bought it and later gave it to the nation.
“a beautiful marine piece”
The vessels Inshore fishing boats working a baited line in the English Channel off Hastings; not individually identified.
Sources V&A
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Two sailing boats on a moonlit sea Unnamed
Seashore by Moonlight (Meeresufer im Mondschein), 1835 to 1836
Artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774 to 1840)
Where to see it Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Medium Oil on canvas
On 26 June 1835 Friedrich suffered a stroke, and afterwards painting was hard for him; from then until 1839 he worked mostly in sepia and watercolour, yet in 1835 to 1836 he still produced this oil. Dark boulders fill the foreground, where two boats lie drawn up on the stones, a banded cloud presses down, and in the moonlight two small sailing boats stand out on the water, with a third far off. There is no figure on the shore to look at them for us. The boats are the last trace of human life in a picture made near the end of his own.
The vessels Small unnamed sailing boats offshore and two open boats drawn up among the rocks of the shore.
Sources Wikipedia (DE) · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Five sailing ships off Utkiek near Greifswald Unnamed
The Stages of Life (Die Lebensstufen), c. 1835
Artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774 to 1840)
Where to see it Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig
Medium Oil on canvas
On a stony shore at Utkiek, near his birthplace of Greifswald, Friedrich placed five figures: himself as the old man with his back to us, his nephew in a top hat, his daughters and his small son holding a Swedish pennant. Out on the evening water five vessels answer them, one for each. The big ship has begun to take in her sails, two smaller boats are still fully rigged close to shore, and two more fade almost transparent on the horizon. Whether the great ship is the old man coming home or leaving for good, the fleet turns a family outing into a meditation on the voyage of a life.
The vessels Baltic sailing ships and boats painted as symbols of the stages of life rather than as individual named vessels.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikipedia (DE)
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Boats on the water at Venice Unnamed
Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute, c. 1835
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (99.31)
Medium Oil on canvas
Turner made a slight pencil drawing of this view on his first visit to Venice in 1819, but the painting is really the fruit of his second, in 1833. He brought to it, as the Met says, his long experience as a marine painter and his brilliance as a watercolourist. Boats move on the water while the foundations of the palaces seem to dissolve into the lagoon in delicate reflections. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1835, it was widely acclaimed. The boats give the dream city its life and its rhythm.
“the foundations of the palaces of Venice merge into the waters of the lagoon by means of delicate reflections”
The vessels Venetian boats carrying goods and people through the city; none is individually identified.
Sources The Met
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Crowded fishing boat, hucksters' boat and a distant steamer Unnamed
Fishing Boats with Hucksters Bargaining for Fish, 1837 to 1838
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Art Institute of Chicago (1922.4472)
Medium Oil on canvas
A crowded fishing boat rides high on rolling, stormy water while a smaller boat of hucksters, peddlers who bought fish at sea to sell in port, fights its way alongside to bargain. Behind them a steamship chugs past, a quiet sign of the new industrial age. Turner framed it in the Dutch manner of Van de Velde, low horizon and all, and then claimed it as his own by signing it on the little white flag flying at the fishing boat's masthead against a sliver of blue sky.
The vessels Working fishing boats and the small boats of hucksters, middlemen who met the fleet at sea to buy the catch; the steamer in the distance is unnamed.
Sources Art Institute of Chicago
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
A sailing frigate off a mountain coast Unnamed
Frigate under Sail (Fregat pod parusom), 1838
Artist Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900)
Where to see it Central Naval Museum, St Petersburg
Medium Oil on canvas
An early Aivazovsky, painted in 1838, the year the twenty-one-year-old returned to Feodosia after graduating from the Academy in St Petersburg, to spend two years in his native Crimea. Nothing here yet of the storms that made him famous: a three-masted frigate lies under sail on a calm evening sea, the mountains pink in the distance, a crescent moon in the pale sky, and a few figures rest on the flat roof of a little building by the shore. It is a young painter's homecoming picture, and the ship is its quiet hero; the next year he would join the fleet's exercises off the Crimea.
The vessels An unnamed three-masted sailing frigate.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Ivan Aivazovsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
HMS Temeraire Named ship
The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838, 1839
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it National Gallery, London (NG524)
Medium Oil on canvas
A veteran of Trafalgar, where she had defended Nelson's Victory, the Temeraire was sold for scrap in 1838 and towed up the Thames from Sheerness to Rotherhithe. Turner, who probably never saw the tow, turned that last passage into an elegy. He gave the stripped hull back her lower masts, painted her white and gold instead of her working black and yellow, and set a squat black tug before her, its funnel moved so that the smoke drifts back through her rigging. The sun goes down behind her in the east, where no sunset could fall. Turner called the picture his darling and would not lend it again.
“as grand a picture as ever figured on the walls of any academy, or came from the easel of any painter”
The real ship A 98-gun three-decker built from more than 5,000 oak trees, the Temeraire fought at Trafalgar in 1805 in defence of the Victory. In 1838, over forty years old, she was sold for £5,530 to the shipbreaker John Beatson and towed by two steam tugs from Sheerness to Rotherhithe, arriving on 6 September, to be broken up.
Sources National Gallery · Wikipedia
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Sailing vessels in Larvik harbour Unnamed
Larvik by Moonlight (Larvik havn i måneskinn), 1839
Artist Johan Christian Dahl (1788 to 1857)
Where to see it Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo (NG.M.00034)
Medium Oil on canvas
Dahl based it on a drawing made on a visit to Larvik in 1834, and painted it with a pendant for the Royal Palace in Christiania, but the newly founded National Gallery bought it instead. The little coastal town lies under the moon on a summer evening, the reflection laid across the still fjord, figures standing in silhouette against the silvery water. The museum stresses the difference from Friedrich: Dahl's figures carry no hidden symbolism, and neither the church spire nor the sailing vessels seem to convey any particular meaning. This is a portrait of a Norwegian coastal community on a peaceful evening, and the ships are simply at home.
“a down-to-earth depiction of a Norwegian coastal community on a peaceful evening”
The vessels Unnamed sailing vessels lying in the fjord at Larvik, a small Norwegian coastal town.
Sources Nasjonalmuseet · Wikidata
Image: Johan Christian Dahl, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Steamboats warned off a shoal Unnamed
Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water, 1840
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts (1955.37)
Medium Oil on canvas
The title is almost a set of instructions: rockets and blue lights, fired close at hand, to warn steamboats off shoal water. Turner paints a storm raging over an English harbour town, the flares tearing up into the sky while figures on the shore watch the sea, hoping, as the Clark puts it, that their loved ones will come home. The steamers are barely more than shadows and smoke in the spray. The ship here is felt through the fear of those waiting for it.
The vessels Coastal paddle steamers of the 1830s and 1840s, for which signal rockets and blue lights were used to warn of shallows and hazards. The vessels are not named.
Sources clarkart.edu · Wikidata
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Ship carrying Sir David Wilkie home, 1841 Unnamed
Peace: Burial at Sea, exhibited 1842
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Tate, London (N00528)
Medium Oil on canvas
Turner's friend, the painter Sir David Wilkie, had travelled to the Holy Land for his biblical pictures and fell ill on the voyage home; he was buried at sea off Gibraltar in 1841. Turner made his memorial out of the ship. She lies still on a cool white sea, her sails black against the sky, while by the flare of torches the body is lowered into the water. It was shown in 1842 beside War, its pair, where fiery Napoleon in exile meets this calm, dignified death. A small seabird lifts off the water in the foreground.
“Turner's achievement is to take a moment of sadness and loss and convey an impression of it as something of extreme beauty”
The vessels The ship that carried Wilkie home from the Holy Land in 1841; he died on the voyage and was buried at sea off Gibraltar. The name of the vessel is not recorded.
Sources victorianweb.org · Wikipedia
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Ariel (paddle steamer) Named ship
Snow Storm: Steam Boat off a Harbour's Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead, exhibited 1842
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Tate, London (N00530)
Medium Oil on canvas
Here the ship is almost swallowed. A paddle steamer, making signals and sounding her way through shallow water, sits at the eye of a vortex of snow, spray and smoke, and the picture asks us to feel the storm rather than read it. Turner said he had the sailors lash him to the mast for four hours so that he could observe it, a story some later writers doubt. One critic of 1842 saw only soapsuds and whitewash, and the jibe hurt him; Ruskin answered that it was one of the grandest statements of sea motion, mist and light ever put on canvas.
“I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like”
The real ship An inscription on the painting says the author was in this storm on the night the Ariel left Harwich. A paddle steamer Ariel, formerly the Arrow built in 1821 to 1822, was acquired and renamed by the Admiralty in 1837 and served as the Dover packet until 1846.
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Sol di Venezia Named in the picture
The Sun of Venice going to Sea, 1843
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Tate, London (N00535, Turner Bequest 1856)
Medium Oil on canvas
A Venetian fishing boat heads out to sea from the city, her sails emblazoned with her name, Sol di Venezia, the Sun of Venice. A stream of splendid colour falls from the boat into a lagoon that reflects the morning sky, with the city and its crowded boats behind. Ruskin, who loved the picture, studied that water so closely that he declared no man had ever painted the surface of calm water but Turner. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1843, it came to the nation with the Turner Bequest.
“no man had ever painted the surface of calm water but Turner”
The vessels A Venetian fishing boat whose sails bear the name Sol di Venezia; the boat is otherwise unidentified.
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Van Tromp's Dutch warship Unnamed
Van Tromp, going about to please his Masters, Ships a Sea, getting a Good Wetting, 1844
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Medium Oil on canvas
Turner's title tells the story. Van Tromp, dismissed from Dutch naval service in 1666 for failing to follow orders and reconciled with his superiors in 1673, brings his ship about in a heavy sea to please his masters. The ship strains against the waves and spray bursts over the bow, while a man in a white uniform on the foredeck waves with confidence, as if the drenching were a courtesy. The title reads like a joke told in a gale, and the picture sets human nerve against the violent power of the sea.
The vessels A seventeenth-century Dutch warship under Van Tromp; the painting does not identify a specific hull.
Sources Getty
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
A sailing boat and a steamer off Folkestone Unnamed
Seascape: Folkestone, c. 1845
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Private collection
Medium Oil on canvas
In a swirl of green, Turner sets two boats heading out to sea below the cliffs of Folkestone: one under sail, the other with a funnel. Old and new meet in a single breath of weather. He chose not to exhibit the picture, thinking it too experimental after similar works had been criticised. It later hung at Saltwood Castle, the home of Kenneth Clark, who considered it the finest painting in the world. Sold at Sotheby's in 1984, it was recorded by Guinness as the most expensive painting of a seascape.
The vessels Two unnamed boats of about 1845 off Folkestone: a sailing boat and a boat with a funnel.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Whaling ship and whaleboats Unnamed
Whalers, c. 1845
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (96.29)
Medium Oil on canvas
Turner was seventy when this appeared at the Royal Academy of 1845. He seems to have undertaken it for the collector Elhanan Bicknell, who had made his fortune in the whale-oil business, but the picture came back to him. A whaling ship stands as a pale ghost of sails in a haze of spray and light while her boats meet a whale. Viewers struggled to find the subject at all, and Thackeray joked that the smear of purple was in fact a whale that had just slapped half a dozen boats into perdition. It is the hunt dissolved into weather.
“That is not a smear of purple you see yonder, but a beautiful whale”
The vessels A sailing whaler of the kind that sent open whaleboats after whales, the trade that made Bicknell's fortune. Not an individual named ship.
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Ships moored at Larsens Plads, Copenhagen Unnamed
Copenhagen Harbour by Moonlight, 1846
Artist Johan Christian Dahl (1788 to 1857)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019.167.2)
Medium Oil on canvas
The Norwegian painter Dahl first painted this Copenhagen waterfront in 1816. It is Larsens Plads, a shipyard and lumberyard named after its founder, Lars Larsen. Thirty years later he painted it again on a canvas twice the size, leaving out incidental detail and heightening the atmosphere, so that ships and quay become a quiet harbour nocturne. He conceived it as the calm pendant to a far wilder picture, a Tyrolean landscape with a waterfall, and it remained unsold at his death.
The vessels Sailing ships lying at Larsens Plads, a shipyard and lumberyard on the Copenhagen waterfront. The vessels are not identified.
Sources The Met
Image: Johan Christian Dahl, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Dutch dogger Unnamed
A Dutch Dogger Carrying Away her Sprit (On the Dogger Bank), 1846
Artist Clarkson Stanfield (1793 to 1867)
Where to see it Victoria and Albert Museum, London (486-1882)
Medium Oil on canvas
Stanfield went to sea as a boy and spent years as a sailor before he painted theatre scenery, and it shows. A Dutch fishing boat on the Dogger Bank is caught in a storm; her sprit has snapped like a twig and one of the fishermen reaches to retrieve it, while huge seas bear down on the tiny craft. Many of his contemporaries thought him the best British marine painter of his time, and this, his masterpiece, was shown at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855.
“On the Dogger Bank, in the cold North Sea, Wearily day and night toil we”
The vessels A Dutch fishing boat of the kind called a dogger, working the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, one of the best fishing grounds but prone to sudden squalls.
Sources V&A
Image: Clarkson Stanfield, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Erebus (whaler) Named in the title
Hurrah! for the Whaler Erebus! Another Fish!, exhibited 1846
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Tate, London (N00546)
Medium Oil on canvas
One of four whaling pictures Turner made in the mid-1840s, when he was past seventy, in the hope that the collector Elhanan Bicknell, whose fortune came from whaling, would buy them; he was disappointed. The title is a whaleman's cry of triumph, naming the ship Erebus as her crew bring in another catch. Ship, boats and men almost dissolve into golden light and haze, the triumph of the title muffled in glowing weather. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1846, it came to the nation with the Turner Bequest.
The vessels A sailing whaler named Erebus in Turner's title; the vessel is not otherwise identified.
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Black Sea Fleet squadron and imperial yacht at Sevastopol Unnamed
The Russian Squadron on the Sebastopol Roads, 1846
Artist Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900)
Where to see it State Russian Museum, St Petersburg (Zh 8237)
Medium Oil on canvas
Painted in the Crimea between January and May 1846, this is the Black Sea Fleet on parade. At the centre a yacht flies the imperial standard, the ships are drawn up before her in ceremonial order, and crowds on the shore greet the emperor. The Russian Museum believes this is the canvas Nicholas I commissioned, shown that summer at Feodosia as Sevastopol before Noon during the Imperial Visit. Among the ships is the flagship Twelve Apostles. Nothing here foretells the Crimean War, when these same ships were sunk at the harbour mouth to keep the enemy fleets out.
The vessels Ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, among them the flagship Twelve Apostles, launched in 1841. According to the Russian Museum they were scuttled at the entrance to Sevastopol bay in 1854 to keep the allied fleet out.
Sources rusmuseumvrm.ru · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Ivan Aivazovsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
A small boat off the North Cape Unnamed
The North Cape by Moonlight, 1848
Artist Peder Balke (1804 to 1887)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019.167.4)
Medium Oil on canvas
Balke visited the North Cape only once, in 1832, yet it became a touchstone of his imagination for the rest of his life. Here the great cliff stands dark beneath a torn, moonlit sky, and in the moon's path a small boat carries three men across the dark water, while sailing boats lie by the rocks and a ship shows far off on the horizon. The boats give the scale and the loneliness of the Arctic coast. Balke's dark palette and expressive brushwork stand apart from the more restrained naturalism of his mentor J. C. Dahl.
The vessels Unnamed small boats of the northern Norwegian coast: an open boat with three men, sailing boats moored by the rocks and a distant ship.
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Wreckage of a sailing ship after a night storm Unnamed
The Ninth Wave, 1850
Artist Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900)
Where to see it State Russian Museum, St Petersburg
Medium Oil on canvas
Aivazovsky's most celebrated picture shows the sea after a night storm. The ship is already gone; what remains is wreckage, to which a handful of survivors cling as a vast wave, the ninth wave of the old sailors' saying, rises over them. The debris forms a cross, and the painting is lit in warm tones rather than grey, so that a chance of survival seems real and hope outweighs terror. The vessel's absence is the drama: all of seafaring reduced to a spar and the will to hold on.
The vessels An unnamed sailing ship lost in a storm; only debris from the wreck survives in the picture. The ninth wave is an old sailing expression for a wave of great size that follows a series of growing waves.
Sources Wikipedia
Image: Ivan Aivazovsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
HMS Victory Named ship
HMS Victory towed into Gibraltar, c. 1852
Artist Clarkson Stanfield (1793 to 1867)
Where to see it Victoria and Albert Museum, London (681-1893)
Medium Oil on millboard
After Trafalgar the battered Victory, carrying Nelson's body, was towed into Gibraltar by HMS Neptune. Stanfield, who had been pressed into the Royal Navy as a youth and later sailed to China in an East Indiaman, painted the scene in the early 1850s. This oil sketch shows the Victory in full starboard view behind the Neptune, on a choppy sea under grey cloud, with men in rowing boats in the foreground and the Rock beyond. A large finished version followed in 1853. Here the great ship is not fighting but mourning, a flagship brought in as a hearse.
The real ship HMS Victory, Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar in 1805, was towed into Gibraltar by HMS Neptune after the battle, carrying the admiral's body.
Image: Clarkson Stanfield, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
SS Austria Named ship
The Burning of the Steamer Austria (L'Incendie du steamer Austria), 1858
Artist Eugène Isabey (1803 to 1886)
Where to see it Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux (Bx E 495), deposit of the Fonds national d'art contemporain (FNAC PFH-808)
Medium Oil on canvas
On 13 September 1858 the Austria, only a few months into her service between Hamburg and New York, caught fire when a red-hot chain used to fumigate the steerage with tar was dropped on deck. With the engine crew overcome, she could not be stopped, and 449 of the 542 people aboard died. Isabey painted the disaster the same year; another of his versions is in the Musée national de la Marine in Paris. The burning steamer, a symbol of modern confidence, becomes here a Romantic vision of catastrophe at sea.
The real ship Built by Caird and Company at Greenock and launched on 23 June 1857 for the Hamburg America Line, she entered the Hamburg to New York service on 1 May 1858. She burned in the North Atlantic on 13 September 1858; the French barque Maurice rescued 67 survivors and the Norwegian Catarina 22 more.
Image: Eugène Isabey; photo Tylwyth Eldar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Broken ship's mast on the ice Unnamed
The Icebergs (originally The North), 1861
Artist Frederic Edwin Church (1826 to 1900)
Where to see it Dallas Museum of Art (1979.28)
Medium Oil on canvas
Church sketched icebergs from a rowing boat off Newfoundland in 1859 and turned them into a vast canvas nearly three metres wide, first shown in New York in 1861 as The North. Some viewers found its empty world of ice unsettling, with no trace of human association. Before the London showing of 1863 he renamed it and painted in a ship's mast lying on the ice, a sense of scale and a concession to those who missed a story; English viewers, among them Jane Franklin and Francis McClintock at the preview, might now read it as a tribute to the lost Franklin expedition. His signature on the ice beside the mast may be seen to form a cross.
“The spectator is supposed to be standing on the ice, in a bay of the berg.”
The vessels The mast belongs to no identified vessel; it evokes the ships of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition to find the North-West Passage, whose fate McClintock uncovered and described in 1859.
Image: Frederic Edwin Church, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Two sailing ships off Point Judith by moonlight Unnamed
Point Judith, Rhode Island, 1867 to 1868
Artist Martin Johnson Heade (1819 to 1904)
Where to see it The Cleveland Museum of Art (1970.161)
Medium Oil on canvas
One of only a handful of night scenes Heade ever painted. Moonlight glimmers on land, sea and sky off Point Judith on the Rhode Island coast, and the darkness swallows detail so that, as the Cleveland Museum of Art puts it, mood matters more than place. At the left two sailing ships move quietly through the shadow, the only sign of human presence in a still, silvered world. They give the picture its scale and its loneliness.
“One of only a handful of nocturnal scenes painted by Heade, this evocative painting captures the effects of glimmering moonlight on land, sea, and sky.”
The vessels The vessels are two unidentified sailing ships off the Rhode Island shore.
Sources Cleveland Museum of Art · Wikipedia
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Sailing ships off Gibraltar Unnamed
American Shipping off the Rock of Gibraltar, 1873
Artist Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900)
Where to see it Private collection (sold Christie's, London, 13 June 2007, lot 30)
Medium Oil on canvas
Aivazovsky, the painter of the Black Sea, here turns west to the gate of the Mediterranean. Sailing ships ride a calm sea beneath the Rock of Gibraltar, at the meeting point of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Signed and dated 1873, the picture shows his command of calm water and light as much as of storm, and his interest in the great seaways of the world beyond Russia. It was sold at Christie's in London in 2007 and remains in a private collection.
The vessels Sailing ships off Gibraltar which the title describes as American; not individually identified.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · wikiart.org
Image: Ivan Aivazovsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Foundering sailing ship and her boat Unnamed
The Rainbow, 1873
Artist Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900)
Where to see it State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Medium Oil on canvas
A sailing ship is foundering off a rocky shore in a storm, masts still standing and sails still set, while her crew pull away in boats and the helmsman points the way. Through the spray a faint rainbow appears, promising rescue. Aivazovsky painted it in 1873, at fifty-six, as an answer to critics who called his improvised manner outdated, and chose restrained, finely worked tones instead of his usual saturated colour. The rainbow over the doomed ship is the whole thought of the picture: deliverance glimpsed at the moment of loss.
The vessels An unnamed sailing vessel wrecked off a rocky coast; the painting shows a type, not a recorded wreck.
Sources Wikipedia (RU)
Image: Ivan Aivazovsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Vesta Named ship
The Battle of the Steamship Vesta with the Turkish Ironclad Fethi Bulend in the Black Sea on 11 July 1877
Artist Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900)
Medium Oil on canvas
On 11 July 1877, early in the Russo-Turkish War, the Vesta, a merchant steamer of 1858 fitted out with mortars and light guns, met the Turkish armoured corvette Fethi Bulend off Küstendje and fought her for five hours. Her steering was shot away and twelve of her men were killed, yet it was the ironclad that broke off and ran. Aivazovsky painted the action the same year, the old master of sail now recording smoke, iron and steam. Admiral Arkas, reporting the battle, set it beside the famous feat of the brig Mercury.
The real ship Built in 1858 as a merchant steamer of the Russian Steam Navigation and Trading Company, Vesta was armed as a wartime cruiser in 1877 under Lieutenant Commander Nikolai Baranov. She was wrecked off Cape Tarkhankut in 1887 with the loss of her crew; the wreck was found in 2016.
Sources wikiart.org · Wikipedia (RU)
Image: Ivan Aivazovsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Boat of shipwreck survivors Unnamed
The Wrath of the Seas, 1886
Artist Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900)
Where to see it Private collection
Medium Oil on canvas
A storm sea breaks against rocks vanishing into gloom, lightning strikes from behind heavy cloud, and moonlight catches its edges. In the left foreground a small boat carries people trying to survive a shipwreck: some row, and one man points towards the coast. Aivazovsky makes this little boat the human centre of an overwhelming scene. Without it the picture would be pure elemental fury; with it, it becomes a story of will and hope, the refusal to give in to the sea.
“His storm has a thrill, a perpetual beauty that strikes the spectator as he is thinking of a live real storm”
The vessels An unnamed boat carrying survivors of a wreck; the painting refers to no identified disaster.
Sources Wikipedia
Image: Ivan Aivazovsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Dvenadtsat Apostolov (Twelve Apostles) Named ship
The Ship Twelve Apostles (Korabl Dvenadtsat Apostolov), 1897
Artist Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900)
Where to see it Aivazovsky National Art Gallery, Feodosia
Medium Oil on canvas
Near the end of his life Aivazovsky painted a portrait of the Twelve Apostles, the 120-gun three-decker launched at Nikolaev in 1841 and counted among the finest sailing warships of the Russian navy. Their paths had crossed: in 1846 she was one of five ships that sailed from Sevastopol to Feodosia to honour his first ten years as a painter, and she appears on eight of his canvases. By 1897 she had lain for more than forty years on the bottom of Sevastopol roads, scuttled in 1855 to bar the harbour. The picture is an old marine painter's act of remembrance.
The real ship A 120-gun first-rate three-decker, lead ship of her class, launched at Nikolaev in 1841 for the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Used as a hospital ship during the defence of Sevastopol, she was scuttled in the roads in February 1855 to block the entrance to enemy ships.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia (RU)
Image: Ivan Aivazovsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
A Turkish warship blowing up Unnamed
Explosion of a Turkish Ship (Vzryv korablya), unfinished, 1900
Artist Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900)
Medium Oil on canvas
On the last day of his life, in April 1900, the eighty-two-year-old Aivazovsky began a picture of a Turkish ship exploding, and it was left unfinished. A painter who had spent a lifetime on fleets, storms and burning ships ends with a single warship bursting apart, a tower of fire and dark smoke above her, against a blue mountain coast. In the foreground an empty boat lies on the dark water, the only other vessel in the scene. It is his last word on the sea he painted more than six thousand times.
The vessels An unnamed sailing ship of the line, identified in the title as Turkish; no specific ship or event is named.
Sources Wikipedia (RU)
Image: Ivan Aivazovsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Turner and the Romantic sea · Painting
Steamship by moonlight Unnamed
Ship by Moonlight, undated
Artist Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1975.280.2)
Medium Oil on canvas
A small canvas, barely 16 by 24 centimetres, in which a steamship crosses a moonlit sea. The Met notes that Aivazovsky preferred sailing ships but sometimes turned to modern steamers like this one. Born in the Black Sea port of Feodosia into its long-established Armenian community, he painted the sea all his life, and in 1880 opened in his home town the third public art gallery in the Russian Empire.
“He preferred to depict sailing ships, but sometimes portrayed modern steamships like this one.”
The vessels An unnamed nineteenth-century steamship; not an identified vessel.
Sources The Met
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where the original is kept. Photo: Arad, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
Explore Ships in Paintings by chapter
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