月明かりの下で石炭を積む船頭たち

Coal was the fuel of industrial Britain, and this is the machinery of that trade caught at night. On the River Tyne at Newcastle, men called keelmen shovelled coal from flat-bottomed boats up into the tall ships that would carry it south to London and beyond. Turner shows them working by torchlight under a full moon, the two kinds of light, silver and fiery, spread across the black water. He had travelled the north-east and knew this was round-the-clock labour, the coal moving day and night to feed the furnaces of the new industrial economy. He exhibited the picture at the Royal Academy in London in 1835, and it later passed into a great American collection, which is how it now hangs in Washington rather than on Tyneside.