1835
oil
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
Line Fishing, Off Hastings is a 1835 oil by Joseph Mallord William Turner, a Romanticism work, held at Victoria and Albert Museum.
You see small boats bobbing in choppy water, fishermen leaning over the sides to drop baited lines, and a hazy sky that melts into the sea. Turner painted this scene twenty years after he first sketched it. He used thin, runny oil paint to blur the horizon, making the water feel alive. The critic who called it "a beautiful marine piece" probably didn’t know Turner had reworked the same view in watercolor first. To see how Turner builds light with layers, look up *glazing*.
The painting depicts inshore fishermen using baited lines in the English Channel, a scene Turner developed from a 1816 sketchbook drawing and an 1818 watercolour. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1835, it was acquired by John Sheepshanks, who later donated it to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1857. The composition shares similarities with a related watercolour in the British Museum but differs in the arrangement of foreground elements and the distance of the land.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in 1775 at Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, where his father kept a barber and wig-making shop.
See the richer artist pageYour cart is empty
Explore artworks →
