Die Mole von Calais

The short-lived Peace of Amiens in 1802 opened the Channel to British travellers for the first time in years, and Turner, then 27, went straight for it on his first trip abroad. The crossing to Calais was rough. His packet boat could not get into the harbour, he transferred to a pilot boat in the swell, and he nearly went into the sea while getting ashore. He painted this the following year from that memory: a green wall of water, fishing boats pitching in it, an English packet edging in past the pier while French fishwives ready their own craft for sea. When it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1803 the response was mixed, though the critic John Ruskin, writing decades later, called it the first painting to show Turner's colossal power. The whole drama gathers in that gap of pale sky torn open between the storm clouds, right over the incoming boat.