Ostend

Turner's journey of 1840, the one on which he saw Venice for the last time, ended at Ostend, on the Belgian coast. A quick sketch from those days, now at Tate, may be where this picture began. Four years later, at 69, he sent the finished canvas to the Royal Academy, which in 1844 still shared its building on Trafalgar Square with the National Gallery. It was one of six pictures he showed there that spring. The view seems to be taken from the end of the eastern pier, looking back towards land, with the western pier in the middle distance. Sailing boats heave through white water into the mouth of the harbour, and the town lies low and pale along the horizon under a sky thick with squalls. The Bavarian State Painting Collections bought the canvas from the art trade in 1975, and it now belongs to the Neue Pinakothek in Munich.