Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth

Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, oil painting created about 1842 by English seascape artist J.M.W. Turner. Turner’s increasingly experimental work drew heavy criticism during the 1840s, and this painting was damned by some critics as “soapsuds and whitewash.” Influential contemporary art critic John Ruskin—Turner’s great champion— however, declared it “one of the very grandest statements of sea-motion, mist, and light, that has ever been put on canvas.”

Turner maintained that he had himself lashed to the mast of the steamboat Ariel that appears in the picture while it crashed about in a sea storm in order to create this painting. This story seems unlikely (no steamboat of that name can be verified), but it shows the artist’s passion for getting inside the heart of the natural world. Viewers of this painting are sucked rapidly into the vortex-shaped composition that Turner frequently used, and the careering compositional lines induce giddy disorientation and a sense of chaos.

This is an unusually subjective picture for Turner’s day, and the fairly limited colour palette and crazily merging swaths of water and light evoke a dreamlike state. Despite this, Turner is in control of every well-observed element—only he, with his knowledge of colour and light, would recall that the fires burning below deck need to be shown in the lemon-yellow shade that would be seen through a curtain of snow. At the vortex’s epicentre, a steamboat is tossed about perilously, symbolizing humankind’s helplessness before nature’s vast forces. Turner is said to have declared of this work: “I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like.”