Rough Sea

ca. 1840–1845

Not on view

Returned to lender

This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.

This late, unfinished painting presents very little in the way of identifiable detail. The dark form in the center could be a seawall or a harbor, but what Turner has really captured is a sense of the power of the sea and the merging of water and air at the horizon line. While many viewers disparaged the rough paintings from the Turner Bequest that first surfaced in the early twentieth century, the Bloomsbury art critic, painter, and early Metropolitan Museum curator Roger Fry admired their abbreviation and restraint, noting that Turner could convey the "intimate, imaginative grasp of the tension and stress which underlie the appearance" of his subject "in a few hurried scratches."

Artwork Details

Overview

Exhibition History

Title: Rough Sea
Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, London 1775–1851 London)
Date: ca. 1840–1845
Geography: Country of Origin Great Britain
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 36 × 48 in. (91.4 × 121.9 cm)
Framed: 42 1/16 in. × 54 in. × 3 1/8 in. (106.8 × 137.2 × 8 cm)
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Tate: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art