This magnificent seascape is one of a series of eight important Thames Estuary scenes that Turner exhibited at his gallery in Harley Street between 1806 and 1809. Other paintings from this celebrated group include The Victory returning from Trafalgar (Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven), Sheerness as seen from the Great Nore (Museum of Replica Handbags s, Houston; fig. 1), Shoeburyness Fisherman hailing a Whitstable Hoy (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), and Sheerness and the Isle of Sheppey (National Gallery of Art, Washington). The early 1800s were a period of fractious relations between Turner and the British art establishment and, significantly, none of these works were shown at the Royal Academy. As the great Turner scholar Andrew Wilton has commented, the whole series ‘has the character of a sequence of very personal experiments, or explorations in the depiction of effects that particularly interested Tuner’.¹ Moreover, their location and subject matter, the mouth of the Thames and its meeting with the sea, was one with particularly personal resonance for him and of which he was especially fond. It was these great early seascapes that established Turner’s reputation as the greatest marine painter of the modern age. Of this group, this picture is one of only two that remain in private hands.

As with the others in the group, Purfleet and the Essex Shore seen from Long Reach is an exercise in rarefied abstraction, using contrasting horizontal and vertical elements in subtle combinations, with the masts of the boats set off against the horizon line of the sea and the interjecting spit of land. In this Turner reveals the profound influence of the great Dutch masters, particularly the cool, balanced seascapes of Jan van der Capelle and the more immediate works of Willem van de Velde the Younger (fig. 2). It was, after all, a print after Van de Velde that Turner told a friend ‘made me a painter’. And yet, in the play of intersecting lines and exquisite harmonies of form and colour, it is clear in works such as this that it was always Turner’s intention to go beyond the pictorial achievements of these great masters. He had made this intention clear as early as 1801 when he exhibited Dutch Boats in a Gale, ‘The Bridgewater Sea-Piece’ (National Gallery, London, fig. 3) and followed it up the next year with Ships bearing up for anchorage, ‘The Egremont Sea-Piece’ (Tate Britain, London). Turner’s sketchbooks provide ample evidence that he put considerable thought into the intricacies of depicting ships in complicated groups and the present work is a particularly refined example of this process.

Furthermore, even in a work as early as this Turner’s vigorous and experimental treatment of both the sea and the sky anticipates the more impressionistic style that he would develop later in his career and which would change the face of Western Art forever. It is perhaps in these early masterpieces that we most clearly see an artist at once rooted in the aesthetic philosophy and culture of his t.mes , perpetually engaged with the art of both his predecessors and contemporaries; and yet the emergence of a creative genius that can be described as the first ‘modern’ painter; who directly inspired the impressionism of the nineteenth century, and presaged the abstract expressionism of the twentieth (see fig. 4).

Long Reach is a stretch of the River Thames, upstream of Gravesend, before its confluence with the Medway, when the river flows out into the North Sea. The town of Purfleet sits on the north bank of the river, in the County of Essex. In Turner’s day it was the site of the Royal Gunpowder Magazine. In the foreground is a small rowing boat with fishermen netting pilchards. Behind them a sprit rigged Thames Lighter, loaded with cargo, cuts across the path of a Man-of-War, its sails furled with washing hanging from the rigging. This is likely one of the guard ships that were stationed at the mouth of the Thames to protect against the threat of French invasion. Britain had been at war with France for all of Turner's adult life and the spectre of Napoleonic threat looms large in many of Turner's seascapes in this early period of his career. To the left a larger, more robust Thames Barge shortens sail against the breezy conditions.

As has been mentioned, Turner thought hard about the composition of such intricate groupings of ships at sea, and evidence suggests he relished them. Where in a landscape he might introduce a vista penetrating deep into the picture space to create depth and recession, her he superimposes a sequence of contrasting vessels to create receding layers of shapes and tones; such as the white furled sheets of the Man of War shining against the dark sky which are subtly offset by the warmer tones of the wind filled sails of the barge crossing in front. This in turn is overlaid by the fishing boat with its glinting catch reflecting, in miniature, the same light as the furled sails of the great warship beyond. In the same way, but with quite different rhythm, the barge on the right with its dark sails in the process of being furled is placed in front of a vessel, half seen behind it, its main sail in full trim, illuminated by the shaft of light that breaks through the storm clouds above. On the horizon, two further warships lead the eye ever deeper into the distance.

The true subject of Turner’s painting, however, are the turbulent waters themselves, which broil and foam right at the viewers' eye level. In reviewing the exhibition at Turner’s gallery in which this painting featured, John Landseer, father of the great animal painter, vividly described the effect upon Turner’s contemporaries of such bravura handling of paint: ‘In treating such objects as agitated seas, the motion and conduct of Mr Turner’s pencil eludes observation… as in the works of Nature himself, you cannot tell or trace the instrument with which the work is produced. A tempestuous sea with all its characteristic features and ever-varying forms, of foam, spray and pellucid wave, is presented to your eye’.

Britain has ever been a marit.mes nation. An island people bound by our proud nautical heritage and the inseparable relationship between the sea and English liberty – ‘for who are so free as the sons of the waves’. It is fitting, therefore, that our greatest artist, Joseph Mallord William Turner, was, in his soul, a marine painter. Turner’s fascination with the sea is a theme that runs throughout his art. Born on the banks of the Thames, he was first taken to the coast at Margate as a boy of eleven and would return there regularly throughout his life. The first painting he ever exhibited, Fishermen at Sea (Tate Gallery, London); his first painting to be engraved, The Shipwreck (Tate Gallery, London); and his first major commission, The Bridgewater Seapiece (National Gallery, London; fig. 3), were all marine paintings and he himself was an enthusiastic sailor and fisherman, noted by contemporaries for his knowledge of shipping and the sea. This is a theme that remains constant throughout Turner's career, and many of his great late masterpieces, those icons of British Art the world over, whether views of Venice or pure seascapes, have at their heart the sea and her ever changing moods (fig. 5). There is even a story (possibly apocryphal) that, in the 1840s, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship by a group of sailors in the middle of storm to better record the experience; and Ruskin records Turner’s hurt reaction to the critical reception received by the painting that resulted from this experience, the artists apparently muttering to himself ‘soapsuds and whitewash! What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea’s like. I wish they’d been in it!’.² (The painting in question is Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, Tate Britain, London; fig. 6.)

Purfleet and the Essex Shore seen from Long Reach was bought directly from Turner following its exhibition at his gallery in 1808 by George Capel-Coninsby, 5th Earl of Essex (1757–1839). Essex was a significant early patron of Turner’s and one of those who supported him through the years of estrangement from the Royal Academy. He had bought the artist’s view of Walton Bridges (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) from the previous year’s exhibition at Harley Street and in 1809 he purchased Trout Fishing in the Dee, Corwen Bridge (The Taft Museum, Cincinnati), again directly from that years exhibition at Turner’s gallery (fig. 7). David Hill has also suggested that Harvest Home and Cassiobury Park: Reaping (both Tate Britain, London), painted circa 1809, were originally either commissioned or painted for Lord Essex.³

A Member of Parliament for Westminster and the elder brother of Admiral Sir Thomas Capel, one of Nelson’s ‘Band of Brothers’, Lord Essex was a major patron of the arts. He established a famous collects ion at his family seat, Cassiobury Park, where he commissioned the architects James Wyatt and his nephew Jeffry Wyatville to make improvements to the house and outbuildings from 1799, as well as employing Humphrey Repton to landscape the park (fig. 8). In 1816 the socialite Frances Calvert commented of Cassiobury that it was ‘a very pretty house, and more full of comforts, curiosities and pretty things than any house I ever saw.^’4 The sale of works of modern British art collects ed by the 5th Earl in 1893 included major works by Sir Augustus Wall Callcott and William Collins; Sir David Wilkie’s The Highland Family (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); Sir Edwin Landseer’s The Cat’s Paw (Minneapolis Institute of Art); and a painting called A Music Party (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), then believed to be by William Hogarth but now attributed to Gawen Hamilton; as well as his three Turners. They were in good company, for it was at Cassiobury that Sir Peter Lely had produced one of his greatest cycles in the seventeenth century and Reynolds had worked for the family in the 1760s.

These early seascapes were both commercially and critically successful and, in large part, responsible for establishing Turner’s contemporary celebrity as not only one of the greatest painters in Europe, but the greatest marine painter that had ever lived. Of them all Purfleet and the Essex Shore seen from Long Reach was particularly singled out for praise. Reviewing the 1808 exhibition at Turner’s gallery, the correspondent for the Examiner wrote, on 8 May that year, ‘we think the Purfleet and View of Sheerness the finest sea-pieces ever painted by a British Artist’, whilst in June that year the Review of Publications of Art commented on the picture saying ‘gloomy, deep-toned shadows, sweep across the Purfleet picture… with so much of the truth of Nature as awakens kindred recollects ions, and causes the spectator to imagine he hears the attendant gusts of wind; and it may be remarked that Long Reach is so known to be exposed to every wind of the compass, that rough water is a marked characteristic of the scene’.

Having been relatively extensively exhibited during the course of the 19^th century, including the seminal Manchester Art Treasures exhibition in 1857 and the major retrospective of Turner’s work at the Guildhall in 1899, as well as a the British pavilion in Paris in 1900, Purfleet and the Essex Shore seen from Long Reach has not been seen in public in over 120 years (other than its brief appearance at auction in New York in 1945). Following its appearance at the Cassiobury Park sale, the painting was acquired by the great American collects or John H. MacFadden (fig. 9), almost certainly through the London dealer Thomas Agnew & Son with whom he worked exclusively. Unlike many American collects ors of his day, MacFadden focused solely on the British school of art, amassing a rich and unified group of works by the likes of Turner, Gainsborough, Constable and Romney. In his will McFadden bequeathed his collects ion to the city of Philadelphia with the caveat that a suitable building be constructed to house it within seven years of his death, thereby providing further impetus to ensure that the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s new neoclassical home would open to the public, albeit unfinished, by 1928. The McFadden collects ion formed the cornerstone of the museum’s holdings of English art before 1900.

Before 1900 McFadden sold the painting to George Jay Gould, a financier and railroad executive who ran the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, Western Pacific Railroad and Manhattan Railway. It was Gould who lent the painting to the exhibition in Paris in 1900. Following his death from pneumonia on the French Riviera in May 1923 much of his estate at Lakewood, New Jersey, was dispersed to pay off debts. Turner’s Purfleet next appeared at auction in New York in 1945, consigned by Alistair McDonald, where it was acquired by the grandfather of the present owners. It has remained in their family collects ion ever since.

Today, this masterpiece of Turner’s early period is one of only a small handful of major oil paintings by the artist left in private hands.

¹ Private correspondence with the vendors.

² E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, The Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols, London and New York 1903–12, vol. XXXIX, p. 584.

³ See Butlin and Joll 1984, p. 128, nos 209 and 209a.

⁴ A.E. Blake (ed.), An Irish Beauty of the Regency. The unpublished diaries of the Hon. Mrs Calvert 1789–1822, London and New York 1911, pp. 269–70.