Port Ruysdael

Although remembered as a landscape painter, J. M. W. Turner was above all else a painter of the sea, especially in the 1830s and 1840s, when he explored the sea’s more threatening moods. Contemplating this picture, John Ruskin, Turner’s greatest interpreter and champion, remarked: “I know of no work at all comparable for the expression of the white, wild, cold, comfortless waves of the northern sea, even though the sea is almost subordinate to the awful rolling clouds.” Port Ruysdael was a title Turner invented as an homage to the Dutch seventeenth-century painter Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/9–1682). The composition was inspired by several marine paintings by Ruisdael, including one in the Louvre that Turner saw on a visit to Paris in 1802. Turner exhibited Port Ruysdael at the Royal Academy in 1827, but it did not sell until Elhanan Bicknell acquired it in 1844, along with Turner’s Wreckers (shown nearby).

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016