Here Turner represents a fleet of shipping at The Nore, the confluence of the Thames and Medway rivers and the point at which the rivers meet the North Sea. Despite its often hazardous waters, many thousands of vessels passed through it on journeys to and from the ports of London, the Continent, and beyond. It was at the time the busiest naval and shipping anchorage in Britain.
1 To intensify the illusion of being on the water Turner here has adopted a very low viewpoint, a compositional feature of many of his marine subjects.
2Eric Shanes writes that ‘across the anchorage from the left to right’ Turner has depicted: ‘a sheer-hulk, a floating crane that was used for masting shipping’; ‘a collier-brig of the type that Turner used frequently for travel to the north of Britain’; ‘a navy longboat flying a white ensign’ with ‘a cutter passing behind it’; and beyond that ‘a lugger’, a ‘distant sailboat’, and finally a ‘man-of-war anchored into the westerly wind’.
3John Ruskin found this drawing to be ‘one of the noblest sea-pieces which Turner ever produced’, praising its compositional minimalism and balance as well as its drama. He writes:
it has not his usual fault of over-crowding or over-glitter; the objects in it are few and noble, and the space infinite. The sky is one of his best: not violently black, but full of gloom and power...the dim light entering along the horizon, full of rain, behind the ship of war, is true and grand in the highest degree.
4Of the composition Ruskin writes:
the subtle varieties of curve in the drawing of the sails of the near sloop are altogether exquisite; as well as the contrast of he black and glistering side with those sails, and with the sea. Examine the wayward and delicate play of the dancing waves along her flank, and between her and the brig in ballast, plunging slowly before the wind...The heaving and black buoy in the near sea is one of Turner’s “echoes”, repeating, with slight change, the head of the sloop with its flash of lustre. The chief aim of this buoy is...to give comparative lightness to the shadowed part of the sea.
5
