Calais Pier
by JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER (English School)
ABOUT 1800, Turner began to hve with a girl of sixteen, his housekeeper, and
continued to live with her untrl his death. The first years of the century were Q
the happiest of his hfe.
He purchased two adjoining houses in London, thence
forth his permanent residence, where he maintained, free of charge, a gallery
of his own pictures. He was a horn tramp, and when the spirit moved him, he
deserted his housekeeper, the watchdog of his possessions, and took to the
open road. He could eat anything, sleep anywhere, work in all kinds of
weather.
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He wandered over Europe, and when wars closed the Continent to
travelers, he sailed up and down the coast in colliers, and made a voyage into
the North Sea with a fishing fleet, lashing himself to the mast for hours in a
storm so that he might observe the elements in their most turbulent mood. His
life during these years, industry aside, was shapeless and enatic, with a steady
drift toward solitude and indecent relaxations.
At heart, Turner was half sailor. Three minutes from his father’s barbershop ran the great river,
and in his boyhood he rode down to the sea in ships,
got the hang of them-every rope and spar-made himself a sailor. His early
paintings of the sea were influenced by the Dutch, but the Dutch, in his opmion,
were limited and passionless. “I know moi e about the sea,” he remarked. “I
know what waves do to ships and what storms and ships do to men.”
In his
twenty-eighth year he painted a scene bearing the long title, Calais Pier: The
English Packet Arriving; French Fishermen Preparing for Sea-a picture
which, for technical proficiency, powerful design, and incredible observation,
stands as far above the works of other marine painters as his later dramas of
light and color stand above those of the impressionists.
Here Turner painted
the sculptural, plastic sea, waves rolling in as no other painter has created
them, piling higher and higher like masonry; he painted the weight and volume
of the waves, the heaving of boats, and the huddled groups of fishermen-a
drama of black clouds, colors, and varied substances in three united scenes,
anyone of which would have been a composition in itself.
