Quillebeuf, Mouth of the Seine

Turner had travelled the Seine estuary in the 1820s, and when he showed this at London's Royal Academy in 1833 he built the picture around a danger the locals knew well. At the village of Quillebeuf the incoming tide can rush up the river mouth in a single steep wave, the mascaret, high enough to swamp a boat. He hazes the church and the little port into his usual storm of light and water, so they almost dissolve. The leaning tower near the centre is a navigation marker, set there to warn boats of exactly that wave.