Fishing Boats with Hucksters Bargaining for Fish

Turner painted Fishing Boats in 1837–38 at the height of his powers, dissolving a busy commercial moment on the shore into a storm of sea and sky. The grounded luggers, the hucksters bargaining over the night’s catch, even the figures themselves all half-lose themselves in the turbulence of luminous atmosphere, the churning water and towering cloud lit through with pewter and gold. It is a picture at once reportorial and sublime, showing how the master of marine landscape turned the everyday business of a fishing port into poetry of weather. The canvas came to the Art Institute from the collection of the painter’s dealer, and remains one of the great British seascapes of the nineteenth century.