Joseph Mallord William Turner, 'Dutch Boats in a Gale ('The Bridgewater Sea Piece')', 1801

In 1801 J.M.W. Turner was an ambitious young painter, using all of his artistic and entrepreneurial skills to succeed in the competitive British art world. Dutch Boats in a Gale was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. The painting was a huge success, with crowds of spectators clustering around it. It secured the artist’s reputation as a leading light of British art.

Francis Egerton, Duke of Bridgewater, a wealthy coal and canal magnate, commissioned Turner to paint a seascape. This was to be a pendant to a work he already owned, Ships on a Stormy Sea by the seventeenth-century Dutch marine painter Willem van de Velde the Younger.

The finished work was intended to hang next to the Dutch painting in Bridgewater House. Turner saw this as an opportunity to demonstrate his skills in direct competition with an acknowledged master. The composition of the Bridgewater Sea Piece is similar to that of Van de Velde’s work, but in reverse. Where the sails of the boats in the Van de Velde picture lean to the left, the boats in Turner’s lean to the right. The dark storm clouds that menace the shipping in Van de Velde’s painting are coming in from the right, and in Turner’s they come in from the left. The opposition of the diagonals must have created a strong link between the two works while at the same time inviting viewers to compare them. Turner also made his painting much larger as if to show that it was superior.

Initially, only guests to Bridgewater House could have seen the two works together. Indeed, a number of fellow artists compared the painting to a work by Rembrandt, Christ in the Storm on the Lake of Galilee, which at that time was in the Hope Collection. In 1837 the Duke of Bridgewater lent both paintings to the British Institution so the public could see them together, but critics were divided as to which was the finest.

The dynamism of Turner’s painting owes much to the rolling, white-spumed sea. Turner’s sea is far angrier than that of the Dutch work. Turner emphasised the dramatic content of his painting through the seeming impending collision of the two boats. The strong wind is driving the boats, and the sailors are desperately trying to avoid each other. The sense of movement is heightened by the contrasts between light and shade. Nature, in this instance the sea and the wind, is greater than the efforts of humans, who are powerless against forces beyond their control. This theme of the Sublime continued to appear in Turner’s work throughout his life.