Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight

Coal heavers pole laden keelboats across a sheet of moonlit water, their dark silhouettes picked out against the orange flare of fires and the columnar glow the moon casts through veils of cloud. Painted in 1835 and thought to show the River Tyne at dusk, this is one of Turner’s great industrial nocturnes: steam and smoke mingle with water and moonlight, while a cool, silvery left side is answered by the hot orange and black of furnaces burning along the unseen quay. Its subject — working men in an industrial riverscape painted on the scale of history painting — was a way of making the contemporary world as thrilling as any antique drama. The picture passed through the collection of P. A. B. Widener and entered the National Gallery of Art, Washington in 1942 by the power of appointment of his son Joseph E. Widener.