East Cowes Castle, the Seat of John Nash, Esq.; the Regatta Starting for their Moorings.

In the summer of 1827 Turner was a houseguest on the Isle of Wight, staying at East Cowes Castle, a mock-medieval pile the architect John Nash had designed for himself. Nash, then in his seventies and busy remaking London for the king, asked his guest for two pictures of the yacht racing that drew fashionable crowds to Cowes each August. Turner worked the shoreline with a sketchbook, watching the boats crowd back toward their moorings as the light went. What he handed over keeps that scramble of sails and wind, with Nash's turreted castle set back on its hill above the water. He showed both canvases at the Royal Academy the following year.