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Lot Essay
This is one of the 96 watercolours painted by Turner for his joint project with Charles Heath, Picturesque Views in England and Wales. As originally planned, almost certainly in the summer of 1825 (see Shanes, 1979, pp. 10, 159 no. 2), there were to have been 120 plates but Heath got into financial difficulties and the project petered out in 1838, having been taken on by Moon, Boys and Graves and eventually Longman. The engravings were issued individually and in parts. Gosport, which was based on sketches executed in about 1823-1824 in the London Bridge and Portsmouth Sketchbook and the Gosport Sketchbook (Tate Gallery, T.B. CCVI and CCVII) including one of the cutter, its sails and passengers (CCVII-3 verso), was probably painted about 1829; it was published in 1831 as plate no. 39. Turner painted two other watercolours of Portsmouth c. 1824, both smaller in size, one was engraved for Southern Coast, and the other for Ports of England, (see A. Wilton, op. cit., nos. 477 and 756.)
This was the second work by Turner to be bought by Ruskin's father. Ruskin wrote an appraisal when he exhibited the watercolour at the Fine Arts Society in 1878: 'A delightful piece of fast sailing, whether of boats or clouds; and another of the wonderful pieces of Turner composition which are delicious in no explicable manner. It was the second drawing of his I ever possessed, and would be among the last I should willingly part with. The blue sky, exquisitely beautiful in grace of indicated motion through fast-flying white clouds seems revealed there in pure irony; the rude figures in the boat being very definitely terrestrial and marine, but not heavenly' (Works, vol. xiii, pp. 439-40). Ruskin acquired Gosport in 1839 while still an undergraduate and recalled in his autobiography, Praeterita, that in the vacation, his 'chief recreation, after Greek and Trigonometry in the nursery-study...was...to go down and feast on my Gosport.
Shanes notes an additional irony in the imminent collision of the cutter with the approaching brig. A piece of humour in tune with the visual conventions of Turner's day is the way in which he has made the gun emplacements on the left look like enormous eyes.
This was the second work by Turner to be bought by Ruskin's father. Ruskin wrote an appraisal when he exhibited the watercolour at the Fine Arts Society in 1878: 'A delightful piece of fast sailing, whether of boats or clouds; and another of the wonderful pieces of Turner composition which are delicious in no explicable manner. It was the second drawing of his I ever possessed, and would be among the last I should willingly part with. The blue sky, exquisitely beautiful in grace of indicated motion through fast-flying white clouds seems revealed there in pure irony; the rude figures in the boat being very definitely terrestrial and marine, but not heavenly' (Works, vol. xiii, pp. 439-40). Ruskin acquired Gosport in 1839 while still an undergraduate and recalled in his autobiography, Praeterita, that in the vacation, his 'chief recreation, after Greek and Trigonometry in the nursery-study...was...to go down and feast on my Gosport.
Shanes notes an additional irony in the imminent collision of the cutter with the approaching brig. A piece of humour in tune with the visual conventions of Turner's day is the way in which he has made the gun emplacements on the left look like enormous eyes.