Exh. RA 1842
Oil on canvas

Turner’s title for this disturbing and original late painting added the first of many supplementary layers of mystery to what was already an eccentric puzzle for its initial audience. His opening statement is relatively descriptive of what can actually be seen:  a steamboat, potentially in peril, is caught at the centre of a swirling vortex of wind and waves, smoke and snow. The burst of white light behind the mast comes from a flare, sent up to alert others to the ship’s difficulties. On the left the water rises steeply above an unsettling, plunging horizon line that disrupts any sense of imminent security, even though the title signifies the proximity of safety.

The problems of further comprehension start with the second sentence. Did Turner mean himself by the term ‘Author’ and, if so, did he mean that he was on the ship that he has depicted? And, finally, is this boat the Ariel? The answer to the first of these questions seems to be that Turner sought to validate his painting by conferring on it the value of personal testimony. His wording implies that the picture has a documentary status, rather like his pictures of the destruction of the Houses of Parliament or (superficially, at least) of the last journey of The Fighting Temeraire (fig.1), though we now know that he did not actually witness the latter event. In fact, his ensuing comments here only claim that he was out on the night of the storm, but do not specifically state that he was at sea. So it is possible that the struggles of the steamboat were witnessed from the harbour walls, a conclusion that is not contradicted by the rest of the information. Indeed, it is almost as if Snow Storm provides a close-up detail of one of the steamers in the Margate scene he had painted a year earlier on the canvas now at Williamstown, USA. However, the germ of the composition can perhaps be found in a watercolour of a steamer off Ostend, where the trough of the wave, coupled with the smoky moonlight above, begins to create a centrifugal vortex effect (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight).

The last question posed by the title concerns the identity of the Ariel and its relationship to the east-coast port of Harwich. Although the steamboat in this picture has often been assumed to be the Ariel, Turner himself introduced the name only as a reference point, rather as though he could rely on his viewers (or readers) to pick up on a familiar allusion. Consequently, the Ariel need not be a steamboat itself. This has not deterred scholars, who have combed maritime records for a suitable candidate, resulting in the Ariel that plied the waters between Dover and the French coast. However, a more satisfactory solution was proposed by Charles Ninnis, who related the anecdote to a legendary storm lasting several days in November 1840 (when Turner’s friend George Jones noted his absence from London). Perhaps the most notable of many calamities was the loss of a boat called the Fairy, together with its crew of more than fifty men, which had left Harwich the day before the storm broke. Clearly, the names are not the same, though the Fairy perhaps invokes Shakespeare’s spirit Ariel in The Tempest. Significantly, the sixty-seven-year-old Turner had encountered rather similar difficulties, stumbling over names, when attempting to specify Venetian churches for his exhibits in 1841 and 1843 (see Warrell 2003, pp.183, 194). Furthermore, since the storms raging on the eastern coast also battered Margate, Turner might plausibly have recreated his version of the storm from what he could have seen at his habitual retreat.

At the Royal Academy in 1842 the painting was widely lampooned. The Athenaeum memorably quipped:

This gentleman has, on former occasions, chosen to paint with cream, or chocolate, yolk of egg, or currant jelly, – here he uses his whole array of kitchen stuff. Where the steam-boat is – where the harbour ends – which are the signals, and which the author in the Ariel . . . are matters past our finding out.

But, according to Ruskin, Turner was most stung by a review that described the painting as nothing more than ‘soapsuds and whitewash’. As this can no longer be traced, it is possible that Ruskin subsequently invented the remark himself, to heighten outrage at Turner’s treatment by the press. Ruskin was also the second-hand source of another celebrated anecdote concerning the picture, claiming that Turner told a visitor to his gallery:

I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like; I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did. But no one had any business to like the picture.

Although this account has frequently been accepted at face value, it clearly draws on myth, recalling Ulysses’ tactics for evading the Sirens or tales of earlier artists’ brave attempts to witness nature raw, such as those of Ludolf Bakhuyzen (1630–1708) and Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714–89), who were both bound to masts. Ruskin is much more reliable in his verdict that the painting is ‘one of the very grandest statements of sea-motion, mist and light, that has ever been put on canvas, even by Turner’.