Fishermen upon a Lee Shore in Squally Weather

A lee shore is the coast the wind is blowing toward, and for a small boat caught in a squall it is the dangerous one, because every gust pushes you back onto it. Turner shows fishermen fighting that push, trying to get their boat out through heavy surf while the sky closes in. He sent the picture to the Royal Academy in 1802. Some reviewers objected to the thick white paint and loose brushwork of the waves, calling the effect “indeterminate and wild” and “unfinished”, and one dismissed it as merely an “admirable sketch”. It found a buyer all the same. Samuel Dobree, a London merchant, acquired it from Turner at or soon after the exhibition, and in one of Turner's sketchbooks a chalk study of the central boat carries his own note, “Mr Dobree's Lee Shore”. Southampton bought the painting in 1951.