The Fish Market at Hastings Beach

In 1810 the beach at Hastings was a front line. Britain had been at war with Napoleon for years, and this stretch of the Sussex coast, the closest point to France, had just been ringed with squat Martello towers built to stop an invasion many expected any week. Turner paints none of that fear. He gives us an ordinary morning of work. Fishing boats are run up on the shingle, a cart hauls off the catch, men and women crowd round wicker baskets to buy and sell. The town behind them was changing fast, growing into a fashionable seaside resort even as the fishermen still worked the shore, and Turner keeps the eye on the sea and the labour rather than the villas. He showed the picture in his own gallery on Queen Anne Street in London rather than at the Royal Academy. That same July it was bought straight off him by John Fuller, a rich and famously eccentric Sussex squire and member of Parliament, for whom Turner would go on to paint a set of views of the county.