Calais Pier was included in the first public display of 34 oils and 102 watercolours from Turner’s bequest to the nation, selected by Ruskin and presented from February 1857 as ‘The Turner Gallery’ in Marlborough House, then the only additional space available to the National Gallery. Ruskin’s account of the oils, entitled Notes on the Turner Gallery 1856 and published in a paper‐covered booklet (price one shilling), provided most people with their first guide to Turner’s works, ordered (with long‐unchallenged authority) into ‘periods’. In these Notes, Ruskin pronounced Calais Pier to be ‘the first’ picture to bear the signs of ‘Turner’s colossal power’.¹

Calais Pier, Ruskin added, was ‘the richest, wildest and most difficult composition’. ‘What actually happens’ in this complex picture is expertly explained by A.G.H. Bachrach (1981).² Turner’s title specifies an ‘English packet arriving’; this is the regular cross‐channel ferry‐boat on the left, dark‐sailed and cutter‐rigged, which has arrived in the outer harbour. Passengers crowd her deck to watch a near‐collision as a large French fishing‐boat with light‐coloured sails makes for the open sea.³ From the piers on both sides of the harbour, small fishing‐boats are trying to put out to sea. On the right, and most conspicuously, a small ketch is ‘frantically trying to get … away from the pier on which she threatens to be smashed by the violent on‐shore wind’. Bachrach draws attention to Turner’s placing of a similar ketch on the left, which has succeeded in putting out from the further pier, and is now in a position to make sail and follow the big fishing‐boat in the centre on her way to the open sea: this is exactly the course that the ketch still at the pier hopes to follow. Bachrach observes that ‘For a sail‐conscious public such implied diagonals would have been perfectly obvious’. The packet‐boat flies a British flag; all the fishing‐boats appear to be local. Turner dubs them ‘French poissards’ in his title; this appears to be an idiosyncratic adaptation of the feminine word ‘poissarde’, denoting a fish‐wife (in a ‘low’ or ‘Billingsgate’ sense).⁴

A strong on‐shore wind bedevils all manoeuvres. But for all the risks in the air, this is not a scene of grave danger, like Dutch Boats in a Gale: Fishermen endeavouring to put their Fish on Board, the so‐called ‘Bridgewater Seapiece’, which Turner had exhibited in 1801 (on long loan to the National Gallery since 1987).⁵ In that picture, collision is imminent, and dark clouds contribute to the sense of danger. In Calais Pier, Ruskin remarked, ‘It is very squally and windy; but the fishing‐boats are going out to sea, and the packet is coming in in her usual way, and the flat fish are a topic of principal interest on the pier. Nobody is frightened, and there is no danger.’⁶ While Ruskin is perhaps unaware of the potential danger, he is surely right to stress that this is not a scene of ‘violent storm’. The fishwives on the pier itself, stolidly getting on with the gutting and scaling, assure us of that, as do the blue sky above the wind, and the band of sunlight on the horizon.

The air of excitement which hangs over the picture is largely an echo of Turner’s own feelings. Calais Pier is based on his own observations on arriving at Calais the previous year. On his first trip abroad, at the age of 27, and taking advantage of the Peace of Amiens, Turner had crossed from Dover to Calais on 15 July 1802, in this or a similar ‘English packet’. Farington, who followed him to France the next month, records that the crossing from Dover to the point of landing at Calais pier took ‘three Hours & 35 minutes’ (and cost ten shillings and sixpence, plus a shilling and threepence to the captain).⁷ Turner’s ‘Calais Pier’ sketchbook (TB LXXXI) contains many pen and ink and chalk studies of shipping, some used in the sea pictures with which Turner made his name in this decade, as well as ideas for historical or mythological paintings such as Hero and Leander (NG 521, pp. 296‐305), painted much later.

A study inscribed ‘Calais Pier’ (fig. 2) provided the essential idea for the painting, indicating a passenger‐boat on the left, a smallish fishing‐boat nearby and another trying to put out from the pier on the right. Turner developed this, with much additional drama, into the principal elements of his finished painting; but in the painting, the central fishing‐boat becomes a larger, light‐sailed trawler, derived from another of his ‘Calais Pier’ sketchbook studies (LXXXI‐151), and its proximity to the ferry‐boat is developed into a drama of nearcollision. In Fishing Boats entering Calais Harbour,⁸ probably painted about 1803, or soon after Calais Pier, Turner depicts another risk of collision taken by two French fishing‐boats in what Professor Bachrach calls ‘another hair‐raising manoeuvre’,⁹ also in a strong wind; this time the scene is set outside the piers, with the town of Calais in the background.

Several studies in the ‘Calais Pier’ sketchbook record Turner’s own arrival in France; most of them are reproduced in the exhibition catalogue Turner en France.¹⁰ A study inscribed ‘Our Landing at Calais – nearly swampt’ (fig. I)¹¹ is often taken as evidence that Turner himself landed in the same high wind that he depicts in Calais Pier; but as Professor Bachrach points out, if the ferry‐boat had to make a tide‐stop off Calais, passengers eager to land could have themselves rowed ashore, and in fact such sketches show a landing from just such a rowing‐boat, more liable to be ‘nearly swampt’. Farington, by 1802 aged 55 and temperamentally less adventurous, waited to disembark from the ferry until ‘we were placed against the Pier in the harbour of Calais, and landed by ladder’.¹²

Calais Pier was one of five paintings which Turner exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1803.¹³ Farington records comments on it from several Royal Academicians, most of whom had not hesitated to praise Turner’s Dutch Boats in a Gale, exhibited two years earlier, particularly for its emulation of the younger Van de Velde. Now full exposure to Turner’s own ‘manner’ rather floored them. West considered that ‘the “Harbour of Calais”, by Turner was clever in his manner but would have been better had more time been employed upon [page 264]it’.¹⁴ Fuseli ‘commended both the “Calais Harbour" and the large Landscape [The Festival upon the Opening of the Vintage of Macon, no. 110 in the 1803 exhibition], thinking they shewed great power of mind, but perhaps the foregrounds too little attended to’;¹⁵ but on the same day Farington added that ‘Garvey said to me today that this praise of such crudeness was extravagant, a Humbug’. Sir George Beaumont considered that ‘Turner finishes his distances & middle distances upon a scale that requires universal precission throughout his pictures, – but his foregrounds are comparatively blots, & faces of figures witht. a feature being expressed’.¹⁶ Constable, making a general comment on Turner’s five exhibits, thought ‘that Turner becomes more and more extravagant and less attentive to nature’.¹⁷ It should be remembered that Turner in 1803 was regarded as a rather uncouth prodigy, capable de tout, but at no point beyond criticism. He had been elected a Royal Academician (on 12 February 1802, at the astonishingly early age of 26) only a year before exhibiting Calais Pier. Neither his works nor his behaviour conformed to the standards to which most Royal Academicians aspired. In short, Turner baffled his elders. Talking about him to Farington in May 1803, shortly after Turner’s election to the Council of the Academy, Ozias Humphry remarked on his ‘arrogant manners … more like those of a groom than anything else; no respect to persons or circumstances’.¹⁸

The sea in Calais Pier came in for heavy and continued criticism. Farington noted that Beaumont thought ‘the Water in Turner’s Sea Piece (Calais Harbour) like the veins of a marble Slab’;¹⁹ nearly a year later, he recorded Thomas Hearne’s remark that in ‘Calais Pier’ the sea ‘appeared like batter’.²⁰ A harsh review in the Sun declared ‘The sea looks like soap and chalk, smoke, and many other things’, while the sky ‘is a heap of marble mountains’; it considered that the picture demonstrated ‘a lamentable proof of genius losing itself in affectation and absurdity’, concluding that ‘the boards of the Pier are well painted, but what an inferior object that is for an artist who has bolder points in view!’²¹

Ruskin detected ‘the first indication of colour, properly so called, in the fish’ lying on the boards of the pier (fig. 3); they appear to be mostly skate, whose rosy‐coloured wedge shapes have attracted painters from Chardin to Ensor (they reappear on the sands in Sun rising through Vapour (NG 479, see p. 267)).²² He recounts that while the engraver Thomas Lupton was at work on a mezzotint of Calais Pier (eventually unfinished, as noted below), Turner called to examine his progress, and also saw his own painting for the first time for several years.²³ ‘In the foreground was a little piece of luxury, a pearly fish wrought into hues like those of an opal. He stood before the picture for some moments; then laughed, and pointed joyously to the fish; ‐ “They say that Turner can’t colour!” and turned away.’²⁴

Calais Pier was based on Turner’s own observations; but his decision to paint it may have been stimulated by seeing, towards the end of his first trip abroad, Jacob van Ruisdael’s Une tempête sur le bord des Digues de la Hollande in the Louvre,²⁵ a very different composition, but one with a stormy sea and dark sky relieved by a band of light along the horizon. Returning from the tour of Switzerland which had been the chief purpose of his trip, Turner arrived in Paris around 27 September 1802; he appears to have devoted the next week or more to making the sketches and memoranda of paintings in the Louvre which densely fill his ‘Studies in the Louvre’ sketchbook (TB LXXII).²⁶ Turner’s pencil sketch of Ruisdael’s Tempest is on page 81 of this sketchbook; his notes on the picture are given in full below.²⁷ Turner criticised Ruisdael for ‘His inattention of the forms which waves make upon a lee shore’, though Bachrach (1981, p. 22) argues that Turner’s comment was not based on knowledge of Dutch shallows and shores. Turner’s own picture is too different to be ‘in part a private competition’ with Ruisdael’s Tempest, as suggested by Jerrold Ziff,²⁸ though his notes indicate that he studied it carefully, and no doubt he learned much from it.

Farington records on 13 May 1803 that ‘Lord Gower asked the price of “Calais Harbour", and Turner signified that it must be more than that for which He sold a picture to the Duke of Bridgewater’ (i.e. more than the 250 guineas for [page 265]which he had painted Dutch Boats in a Gale, the so‐called ‘Bridgewater Seapiece’, for Lord Gower’s great‐uncle the 3rd and last Duke of Bridgewater in 1801). Calais Pier remained in Turner’s possession. In a note of about 1810 in his ‘Finance’ sketchbook (CXXII‐36), Turner set a figure of £400 against ‘Calais’ (but see Finberg 1961, p. 171).

A mezzotint of the subject was begun by Turner’s friend the engraver Thomas Lupton. W.B. Cooke saw ‘Turner’s grand picture of Calais Pier’ in Lupton’s studio on 20 February 1835, and according to Ruskin’s ‘fish’ story quoted above the painting was there for several years. The engraving was never completed. Turner was continually dissatisfied with its progress, believing that in reducing the scale of his picture to that of the plate Lupton had misjudged the relative proportions of the shipping, and demanding so many alterations that Lupton refused to proceed. Rawlinson describes it as a ‘fine plate’, and records several engraver’s proofs, but no impressions were published.²⁹

Turner’s Calais Pier made the subject popular. As Mary Bennett and Edward Morris suggest,³⁰ it is likely to have directly inspired the oil of Calais Pier, dated 1844‐5, made by David Cox (1783‐1859), chiefly a watercolourist. Cox is known to have admired Turner’s work. He himself visited Calais in 1826 and again in 1829, when he spent a week sketching there, exhibiting his first Calais Pier, a watercolour, in 1829. His oil of Calais Pier of 1844‐5 appears to be his only oil painting of a continental subject,³¹ and although the composition is his own, the Turneresque qualities of Cox’s view of the pier crowded with fishwives and sailors (a brisk sea in this case to the right) strongly suggest that he is likely to have seen Turner’s picture, either in Turner’s house or in the studio of the engraver Thomas Lupton.