Turner, The Harbor of Dieppe , c. We love him because he challenges us, dares us even, to keep looking; and the more he does so, the more we look; and the more we look, the more deeply we fall in love. And then of course there is the sheer volume of his output. In scope and in scale he managed to churn out a seemingly endless stream of dazzlingly beautiful paintings, treating an equally dazzling range of subjects: battle scenes, shipwrecks, avalanches and snow storms.
This painting, though, is quieter, more subdued, which is partly what draws me to it. Turner completed the painting in , a year after exhibiting it in the Royal Academy, along with its companion piece Cologne: The Arrival of a Packet Boat: Evening , the one set at dawn, the other at dusk.
As with most of his paintings, the composition was drawn from sketches made in situ, these dating back to his trip to France. Waterfront detail , J. Dieppe Harbor on the coast of Northern France at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a bustling commercial hub. Turner delights in capturing the throng, populating the waterfront with crowds of people going about their daily business, some industrious, others less so.
These references to the mundane and the sordid are not, however, what first strikes us about the painting, rather it is that marvelous sun, creating a great ball of light in the sky which spreads out like a sheet of gold across the surface of the water. Some in fact criticized him for transposing a Mediterranean light onto a Northern European setting, a criticism that reveals a tendency to idealize the Italian countryside as some kind of pastoral idyll in contrast to the more industrialized landscape of the north.
Turner himself was probably sympathetic to this view and the painting can be read as a Romantic response to the expansion of international commerce that followed the Napoleonic wars. While the water facilitates trade, allowing the free flow of capital, the gloriously sublime quality of the sun serves to remind us that we are not the ones in control.
