Port Ruysdael

The place in this title does not exist. Turner invented Port Ruysdael as a tribute to Jacob van Ruisdael, the Dutch marine painter he had admired since 1802, when a brief lull in the wars with France let him cross to Paris and study the Dutch pictures in the Louvre. So the harbour is a fiction, but the sea is not. Turner gives you the grey, cold, restless water of the North Sea, with a broken post marking the channel and a boat working out against the weather. He showed it at the Royal Academy in 1827, and it sat unsold for 17 years. John Ruskin later said he knew of nothing to match it for the feel of a comfortless northern sea.