Entrance of the Meuse: Orange-Merchant on the Bar, Going to Pieces; Brill Church bearing S. E. by S., Masensluys E. by S.

The long title is a position report. Brill church bearing south-east by south, Maassluis east by south, two bearings that fix where you are standing: out on the water at the mouth of the Maas, above the sandbar that guards the approach to Rotterdam. The ship going to pieces on that bar is an orange-merchant, a trader bringing citrus north to Dutch ports. Turner had toured the Low Countries in 1817, and two sea pieces came out of that journey. The other one, a Dordrecht packet-boat, is becalmed. This he showed at the Royal Academy in the summer of 1819, in the exhibition rooms at Somerset House, and about four weeks after the show closed he set out for Italy for the first time. It stayed in his studio and came to the nation with the rest of it in 1856.