The Junction of the Thames and the Medway

Where the Medway runs into the Thames there is a stretch of open water called the Nore, and in 1807 it was one of the busiest places in Britain. The fleet mustered there, colliers came down from Newcastle, and a few miles up the Medway the dockyard at Chatham was building ships for the war with Napoleon. Turner was 32 that year and was elected the Royal Academy's professor of perspective that December. He kept this canvas out of the Academy's exhibition and hung it in his own gallery in London instead, where Thomas Lister Parker bought it almost at once. The weather does most of the work in it, and in the foreground a rowing boat with four men aboard sits low among the waves.