Fishermen at Sea
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''Fishermen at Sea'', sometimes known as the ''Cholmeley Sea Piece'', is an early oil painting by English artist J. M. W. Turner. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1796 and has been owned by the
Tate Gallery Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...
since 1972. It was the first oil painting by Turner to be exhibited at the Royal Academy. It was praised by contemporary critics and burnished Turner's reputation, both as an oil painter and as a painter of maritime scenes.


Description

The painting measures and is an
oil painting Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of ...
. ''Fisherman at Sea'' depicts a moonlit view of fishermen on rough seas near the
Isle of Wight The Isle of Wight ( ) is a Counties of England, county in the English Channel, off the coast of Hampshire, from which it is separated by the Solent. It is the List of islands of England#Largest islands, largest and List of islands of England#Mo ...
, and is a work of
marine art Marine art or maritime art is a form of figurative art (that is, painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture) that portrays or draws its main inspiration from the sea. Maritime painting is a genre that depicts ships and the sea—a genre parti ...
. It juxtaposes the fragility of human life, represented by the small boat with its flickering lamp, and the sublime power of nature, represented by the dark clouded sky, the wide sea, and the threatening rocks in the background. The cold light of the Moon at night contrasts with the warmer glow of the fishermen's lantern. The chalk formations on the left of the work were traditionally thought to be
the Needles The Needles is a row of three stacks of chalk that rise about out of the sea off the western extremity of the Isle of Wight in the English Channel, United Kingdom, close to Alum Bay and Scratchell's Bay, and part of Totland, the westernmo ...
on the western tip of the island; however, this has been contested, with some scholars suggesting that the chalk cliffs are instead the ones at the nearby Freshwater Bay. The work shows strong influence from the work of artists such as
Claude Joseph Vernet Claude-Joseph Vernet (14 August 17143 December 1789) was a French painter. His son, Antoine Charles Horace Vernet, was also a painter. Life and work Vernet was born in Avignon. When only fourteen years of age he aided his father, Antoine Vernet ...
, Philip James de Loutherbourg, and the intimate nocturnal scenes of Joseph Wright of Derby, especially in its handling of light and shadow.


Creation and history

Turner enrolled at the Royal Academy of Arts at the age of 15. He began as primarily a
watercolour Watercolor (American English) or watercolour (British English; see spelling differences), also ''aquarelle'' (; from Italian diminutive of Latin ''aqua'' "water"), is a painting method”Watercolor may be as old as art itself, going back to t ...
painter in the early 1790s. He likely experimented with oil privately while in the Academy's schools, but if so, these oil paintings were not publicly shown and were lost. In general, oil paintings were considered more prestigious in the era, and Turner recognized he would have to create them if he was to gain the recognition he craved; ''Fishermen'' would be his first major oil painting. Turner had also done maritime scenes in watercolour during the early 1790s, showing an early interest in them. He traveled to the Isle of Wight in 1795 and took a sketchbook with him; the drawings and watercolours made then may have been used as reference material when composing ''Fishermen at Sea''. Turner had just turned twenty-one years old before the 1796 Royal Academy exhibition where ''Fishermen'' was unveiled to the public. The two paintings ''Fishermen at Sea'' and ''Moonlight, a Study at Millbank'' was sold together to an obscure person called "General Stewart" for £10 (adjusting for inflation, around £1300–1400 in 2022 currency). The painting was acquired by Sir Henry Charles Englefield; after his death in 1822, it was sold at Christie's on 8 March 1823, as ''View of the Needles, with the effect of Moon and Fire Light''. It was bought by Englefield's nephew Francis Cholmeley, and it remained in the Cholmeley family for nearly 150 years, displayed at Brandsby Hall, and it became known as the ''Cholmeley Sea Piece''. It was loaned regularly to the Tate Gallery from 1931, and sold to the Tate Gallery in 1972 by Francis William Alfred Fairfax-Cholmeley, with finance from the Beatrice Lizzie Benson Fund.


Similar works

''Fishermen'' strengthened Turner's reputation. Possibly due to the
Napoleonic Wars The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) were a series of major global conflicts pitting the French Empire and its allies, led by Napoleon I, against a fluctuating array of European states formed into various coalitions. It produced a period of Fren ...
and the romantic importance of the sea and the British Navy during them, marine art was popular in Britain in the decades following ''Fishermen''; Turner produced a number of similar works of marine art that sold for good prices. Years later, Turner made a similar watercolour study, ''Moonlight at Sea'' (c. 1818), for his '' Liber Studiorum'', although the engraved plate was not published. Other Turner pieces that play with the interaction of moonlight and the sea include ''Shields, on the River Tyne'' (1823), ''Temple of Poseidon at Sunion, Cape Colonna'' (c. 1834), ''Disaster at Sea'' (c. 1833–35), and ''Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight'' (1835). Turner would revisit marine art with new vigor in the 1830s and onward; in the 1840s, seascapes would account for three-quarters of Turner's overall output.


Analysis

The contemporary journalist
Anthony Pasquin John Williams (1761–1818) was an English poet, satirist, journalist and miscellaneous writer, best known by the pseudonym of Anthony Pasquin. Life He was born in London on 28 April 1761, and was sent in 1771 to Merchant Taylors' School. There ...
(John Williams) gave a recommendation for the piece, writing that the painting "is one of the greatest proofs of an original mind, in the present pictorial display: the boats are buoyant and swim well, and the undulation of the element is admirably deceiving." Art historian Andrew Wilton wrote in 1987 that the painting "is a summary of all that had been said about the sea by the artists of the 18th century."


Notes


References


External links


Joseph Mallord William Turner, ''Fishermen at Sea'', exhibited 1796
Tate Gallery *
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ''Moonlight at Sea (The Needles)'', c. 1818
Tate Gallery
''Fishermen at Sea''
Google Cultural Institute {{J. M. W. Turner 1796 paintings Paintings by J. M. W. Turner Collection of the Tate galleries Maritime paintings Moon in art Culture on the Isle of Wight