An essay by Ian Warrell

Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore at Margate, and another related study of Waves Breaking against the Wind, also in the Tate collection, possibly constitute Turner’s first attempts at the end of the 1830s to set down in oil his impressions of the coast at Margate. Unlike his contemporary and rival John Constable (1776-1837), JMW Turner very rarely made preliminary composition sketches in oils for the works he exhibited at the Royal Academy.  So this picture is interesting both in itself as an incomplete private meditation on the motion of the sea, and also for how it informed the decisions Turner made in developing Rockets and Blue Lights (close at Hand) to warn Steam-Boats of Shoal-Water, which was first exhibited in 1840 (now in the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts).  

The first thing to notice is its size. Turner was very much a creature of habit in some aspects of his working practice, and throughout his career he most often selected canvases measuring around 90 by 120 centimetres (or 36 by 48 inches) – essentially double the size of this painting.. However, by 1840 he had started to adopt a smaller format for a sequence of views of Venice (his most commercially successful group of works in his later carer), choosing essentially the same dimensions as those in this study. Simultaneously he was beginning to experiment with a variety of supports for the sketches he made during his visits to Margate, ranging from canvas and panel, to papers and boards of different types and colours. Evidently he was seeking supports that would be smaller and more portable, so that they could be transported back to London more easily. 

It is unlikely that this work was painted directly from nature, despite the subject’s proximity to the lodgings he stayed in with Mrs Booth. Talking about one of his most famous pictures created just a couple of years after this work, he claimed that during a snowstorm at sea he had been tied to the mast in order that he could record it accurately. That is now generally thought to be an attempt to lend a heroic quality to the role of the artist, based on mythical narratives, such as Ulysses’s encounter with the Sirens. Nevertheless, Turner confronted the elements directly on his travels throughout his life and was able to recall specific effects effortlessly with or without the visual prompts of his sketches. Rather than colouring on the spot, he preferred to work more quickly with rudimentary pencil notes that triggered his memory back in his studio. Over time, the appearance of these notations became more economic, effectively resulting in his own kind of shorthand.   

Looking across the surface of the painting you can sense how it is built on a structure of distinct zones of colour: yellow and blue for the sky, and a neutral grey foreground, with further layers of earthy brown. All the significant details are worked up in a thickened form of paint known as ‘impasto’, which would possibly have had more body and been even more noticeably textured before the picture was cleaned and ‘restored’ in the early twentieth century.  For example, the chalk cliffs at the left edge of the canvas now appear flattened and rubbed. The most striking and spectacular of these impasto additions to the image were the white highlights used to recreate the surging crests of dynamic waves as they crash against the man-made structures projecting out to sea, or for the more depleted waves rolling and tumbling onto the shore. Turner makes vivid use of the liquidity of his paint, scraping and pushing it around in ways that imitate the constantly fluid impressions created by the churning sea. Turner was, of course, working just as photography was in its infancy, but it was to be many decades before any kind of instantaneous ’snap shot’ was possible using that technology to capture precisely the effects Turner delights in here. 

Another intriguing aspect of the painting is the apparent lack of any human presence. There is a grey silhouette just below the cliffs, which is perhaps the beginnings of a figure, and further down what appears to be a blazing brazier with something, or someone, reclining beside it. Otherwise, the human dimension to the setting is merely implied by the structures of the harbour. Less noticeable is the spindly upright of a ship’s mast behind the spraying wave at the centre of the image, but here it just hints at the narrative Turner went on to explore much more fully in the full-scale painting he exhibited in 1840. 

For that work Turner transferred the composition devised here to a larger canvas and then went considerably beyond what is represented here by adding much more detail – what is known as ‘finish’ – so that objects and people are readily definable and less indistinct. He also introduced as the crucial actors in the scene two steamboats battling against the strong currents in their attempts to reach the safety of the land. Their alarm is signalled by the firing of a rocket from the harbour which is intended to shed light and provide some bearings for steering the steamers.  All of this builds on the raw essence he had set down more simply in this study. 

The reviewers of the 1840 exhibition considered Turner’s expressive use of paint for the moving waters ‘very odd’, claiming it looked like ‘hair-powder and pomatum, not over-well mixed’. In summary, they dismissed the picture as one of his ‘absurd extravagances’.  Another unsympathetic critic anticipated the way some modern artworks have been derided, suggesting it ‘would be equally effective, equally pleasing, and equally comprehensible if turned upside down.’    

One wonders what they would have thought of the present study, which was only displayed for the first time after 1910. Indeed, it is a mark of how far we have travelled since Turner’s death in 1851 that we are more inclined to appreciate ‘unfinished’, experimental studies, than the more resolved works based on them, which proved so controversial in their own time. 

Ian Warrell is an independent curator and writer specialising in British art of the nineteenth century. He previously held the position of Curator of 18th and 19th Century British Art at Tate and is an authority on the life and work of JMW Turner.