Stop and Look – J M W Turner: Purfleet and the Essex Shore as seen from Long Reach
Turner is often thought of as a London painter, but the fact is that he produced remarkably few pictures of London itself, although he lived there all his life.
On the other hand, London’s river, the Thames, was a favourite subject for him. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, when he was about thirty, he was fascinated by the wide expanses of the estuary and the great variety of vessels that plied the reaches between the German Ocean (the North Sea) and the capital.
This canvas is a rarity in that it has been preserved in excellent condition – having always been in private collections it was never subjected to the distressing neglect the artist himself allowed his work to undergo. As a result we can see with unusual clarity the details of weather, sea and shipping that he loved to observe and record
In this scene we are not in the estuary itself, but upstream near Purfleet. Turner has exaggerated the width of the river. We must assume that the town of Purfleet is the settlement just visible at the far right. In one of the sketchbooks in use at this time Turner jotted a river scene near Purfleet, and noted “Beautiful Grey Purples” in the sky. We have just such a sky here. It changes from a low, dark rain-cloud on the left to high ribbons of light cloud against blue on the right, with the details of boats and buildings crisply observed in clear light.
The left side of the picture superimposes a sequence of contrasted vessels to create receding layers of shapes and tones: the white furled canvas of the large ship, perhaps a guardship, with washing hanging in its rigging, shines against the dark sky but is subtly set off by the warm cream and grey of the sails of the barge crossing in front of it. The barge is seen beyond a small rowing boat in which four men are landing a basket of sprats, and tipping them into the boat’s fish well. The tiny fish reflect, in miniature, the same light as the furled sails of the great ship beyond. The barge between them is loaded with timber, neatly piled.
In the same way, but with a quite different rhythm, the foreground boat on the right, in shadow and with its brown sails furled, is placed in front of a vessel with tan sails set, half-seen behind it. Another vessel, very possibly another guardship, is seen isolated on the horizon. Purfleet, on the north or Essex shore of the Thames is halfway between Erith at the west end of Long Reach and Greenhithe in the east. Turner suggests that the Thames is much wider here than it is in reality, with the Kent coast barely visible in the far distance.
The exact location of the scene is not clear despite Turner’s specifications in the title. In the immediate foreground the choppy water heaves and tosses directly under our feet: we are also part of the local traffic. Apparently Long Reach was “so known to be exposed to every wind of the compass that rough water is a marked characteristic of the scene.” Nevertheless, the high flare of what appears to be spray on the shore at the far right seems too exaggerated to be the natural result of the conditions Turner shows. But it doubtless represents a phenomenon that he had observed at that place: the instinct for accurate topography that had been inculcated in his youth never left him.