Van Tromp's Barge Entering the Texel, 1645

Turner painted this in 1831, but the scene is from 1645: the barge of the Dutch admiral Maarten Tromp standing in toward the Texel, the channel at the top of Holland. The timing was not idle. The Netherlands he knew was coming apart, with Belgium in revolt since 1830 and France stepping in, and he made a run of seven Dutch subjects in these years that reads as a nod to the old maritime nation and to the sea painters he had long studied. He sent it to the Royal Academy that spring, where the architect Sir John Soane bought it straight off the wall for his crowded London house. It hangs there still, in the North Drawing Room of Soane's museum, in the ornate curved frame Turner chose for it himself.