Joseph Mallord William Turner

Dover, being the nearest British port to the Continent, has always retained ‘strong symbolic associations as Britain’s premier gateway and bastion’ the curator James Hamilton writes.1 Dover Castle, whose keep and outer curtain walls are sunlit in the drawing atop the precipitous headland, was built in the 1180s for Henry II and completed under his successor Henry III.2 The castle was refortified from the 1750s and further modifications for artillery followed during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.3

A steamship, symbolic of the modernism of the age, is incorporated into this view. Silhouetted against the white cliffs, the packet underscores, writes James Hamilton, ‘Turner’s view of the patriotic importance of Dover in Regency Britain’.4 The intrepid vessel, presumably the regular cross-Channel passenger service to Calais, ‘steams cheerily out to sea, while all around it sailing ships do the wind’s will, and oarsmen puff and pant’.5 The steam issuing from its chimney is rendered, as Eric Shanes writes, in ‘an adroitly simple squiggle’, perhaps one of the reasons why a reviewer from the Athenaeum remarked that the packet resembled a toy-like ‘puppet boat’.6 Turner’s diminutive, sooty machine plunged into shadow makes manifest the sentiments of the American inventor and painter Samuel Finley Breese Morse who called the Dover-Calais steamers ‘small, black, dirty, confined things’.7 The shipping surrounding the steamer, from the left, is ‘a gig with its lugsail being set and its crew hauling on the oars’; a ‘lobster boat with fishermen waiting patiently with folded arms’; in the distance the skeletal timbers of ‘beached, wrecked brig’; ‘a small, heavily laden hoy’; a ‘lugger’, and finally ‘the ubiquitous Turnerian brig’.8

Ruskin disapproved of Turner’s ‘habit of local exaggeration’, manifest largely in the cliffs which ‘make the town at their feet three times lower in proportionate height than it really is’.9 As a result Ruskin observed that the barracks on the left hand of the cliff had ‘the air of a hospice on the top of an Alpine precipice’.10 The ‘rest of the composition’, he writes, is ‘more commonplace than is usual with the great master; but there are beautiful transitions of light and shade between the sails of the little fishing-boat, the brig behind her, and the cliffs’.11