Port Ruysdael

Turner exhibited this painting at the Royal Academy in 1827, the year of his second Continental tour, and the museum records that it was conceived as a homage to the Dutch marine painter Jacob van Ruisdael, whose name supplies that of the fictional port in the title. John Ruskin, Turner’s most tireless champion, thought it unsurpassed among northern seas, writing, “I know of no work at all comparable for the expression of the white, wild, cold, comfortless waves.” It entered the collection of Elhanan Bicknell in 1844 and passed through the celebrated Bicknell sale of 1863 and the Kelk sale of 1899 before Sir George Alexander Drummond of Montreal bought it in 1900; after the Drummond sale of 1919 it crossed to New York. It reached the Yale Center for British Art with the Paul Mellon Collection in 1977.