Saint Mawes à la saison de la sardine

Turner toured Devon and Cornwall in 1811, sketching the coast for a series of engravings, and this picture came out of that trip. He did not send it to the Royal Academy. In 1812 he hung it in his own gallery on Harley Street in London with five other West Country subjects, which let him set his own terms. What he had gone down to look at was a working industry. The pilchard shoals came into the Cornish coves each summer, and the fish were salted in cellars and shipped to Italy and Spain, where Catholic households ate them on fast days. Nearly 20 years of war with France had cut those markets about badly, and the war was still going on when he painted this. Pendennis Castle, which guards the mouth of the harbour, stands in the distance across the water.