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Rotterdam Ferry-Boat
J. M. W. Turner·1833
Historical Context
Turner's Rotterdam Ferry-Boat (1833) at the National Gallery of Art depicts the commercial waterway traffic of Rotterdam — the Dutch port that was the major gateway for English trade with the Rhine valley. Turner visited the Netherlands in 1825 and 1835, and his Dutch subjects reflected both his admiration for the Dutch landscape tradition of the seventeenth century and his interest in the contemporary commercial vitality of the Netherlands. The ferry-boat subject — the ordinary commercial traffic of a working port — gave him the combination of specific topography and maritime atmosphere that he had developed in his British coastal works. The Rotterdam light, lower and cooler than Italian or Venetian light, created different atmospheric effects that his palette registered with characteristic sensitivity.
Technical Analysis
The vast Dutch sky dominates the composition, with the ferry and river providing horizontal emphasis. Turner's handling of the flat, reflective water surface creates a luminous atmospheric effect that dissolves the boundary between water and sky.
Look Closer
- ◆Notice the Dutch sky dominating the composition: Turner was deeply influenced by Dutch seventeenth-century landscape's treatment of vast skies over flat water, and Rotterdam allowed him to engage with this tradition directly.
- ◆Look at the ferry-boat as compositional anchor: the vessel's dark hull provides a specific material object within the vast atmospheric expanse of sky and water.
- ◆Observe the flat reflective water surface capturing the sky's colors: the Rotterdam harbor's still water creates the mirror effect that Dutch painters had explored and Turner further developed.
- ◆Find the distinctive low horizon line: characteristic of Dutch landscape composition, the horizon sits very low, giving the sky three-quarters of the pictorial space.
Provenance
Purchased 1833 at the time of the Royal Academy of Arts (London) exhibition[1] by Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro [1795-1865], Novar, Ross and Cromarty, Scotland; (sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 6 April 1878, no. 101); bought by (Thos. Agnew & Sons, London), for Kirkman Daniel Hodgson, Ashgrove, Kent; by descent to Robert Kirkman Hodgson, Gavelacre, Hampshire; sold 1893 to (Thos. Agnew & Sons, London); purchased the same year by Sir Charles Clow Tennant, 1st bt. [1823-1906], The Glen, near Innerleithen, Peeblesshire, Scotland; by descent to his grandson,[2] Christopher Grey Tennant, 2nd baron Glenconner [1899-1983], The Glen; sold July 1923 to (Charles Carstairs for M. Knoedler & Co., London), from whose New York branch it was purchased November 1923 by Andrew W. Mellon, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.; gift by 1937 to his daughter, Ailsa Mellon Bruce [1901-1969], New York; bequest 1970 to NGA. [1] The painting was number 8 in the catalogue of the exhibition. [2] On the Tennant family see James Dugdale, "Sir Charles Tennant, the Story of a Victorian Collector," _The Connoisseur_, 178 (September 1971): 11.
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