Exh. RA 1796
Oil on canvas

Fishermen at Sea was Turner’s first oil painting to be exhibited at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition. He had been showing watercolours there since 1790, and indeed he had ten on display on this occasion. He turned twenty-one shortly before the exhibition, and no doubt felt it was time to make his mark as a painter by showing a work substantially more ambitious than the topographical subjects with which he was beginning to make his name, especially as these tended to be regarded as mere ‘mapwork’ in the academic hierarchies of the day. There are few traceable examples of his attempts at oil painting before this time, but the competence and quality of the present work suggests this was not his first substantial attempt.

The boats are shown off the Isle of Wight, the large island off the southern coast of England that protects Portsmouth (nos.53-4). Turner had visited the island in 1795, making drawings and watercolour sketches of the coast in his Isle of Wight sketchbook (TB XXIV), although none is precisely related to the painting. Until recently, it was thought that the series of chalk formations on the left of this picture were the famous Needles, which mark the western tip of the island. However, it is now thought that Turner shows those at Freshwater Bay, which had already been depicted by Edward Dayes (TB CCCLXXI E). The composition was praised for its naturalism in the Critical Guide to the Academy exhibition: ‘the boats are buoyant and swim well, and the undulation of the element is admirably deceiving’. In fact, Turner was consciously emulating the style of earlier artists, such as Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714–89), Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–97) and Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812), in his handling of light and shade, and the combination of moonlight and firelight. The apparently smooth technique and careful finish may reflect the influence of de Loutherbourg’s continental training in particular. Nevertheless, there is already a hint of the energetic vortex structure that was to be so significant in later works such as Snow Storm – Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (no.94).

In 1797 Turner followed up this first exhibited success in oils – reportedly acquired for £10 by the otherwise obscure General Stewart – with the less ambitious, and possibly earlier, Moonlight, a Study at Millbank (Tate, B&J 2), which was unsold at the Academy. Britain remained at war with France at this time and for much of the next twenty years, and in the context of the heightened significance of the coast and sea to the life and very survival of the nation, Turner was to make his name with a series of major early sea pieces (and indeed such subjects constituted a significant proportion of his overall output in oils). The most significant of which was an ambitious response to Willem Van de Velde the Younger’s Dutch Shipping Offshore in a Rising Gale (c.1672, Toledo Museum, Ohio). This was then owned by Francis Egerton, the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater (1736–1803), who commissioned Turner’s Dutch Boats in a Gale of 1801 as its pendant (private collection, B&J 14). A mere five years on from Fishermen at Sea, and painted while Turner was only an Associate of the Royal Academy, it was described by Benjamin West, its president, as ‘what Rembrandt thought of but could not do’.

In 1818 Turner engraved the Fishermen for his Liber Studiorum (see nos.28–33), but the plate was not published. The watercolour study varies in every detail but is recognisably the same composition, significantly suggesting that Turner retained a strong visual memory of his first successful oil painting, even after so many years (TB CXVIII V). The combination of moonlight and the sea was to remain an evocative theme in his work.