Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed

In 1817, two years after the end of the Napoleonic wars, Joseph Mallord William Turner traveled to Continental Europe. In Dordrecht, a port city in Holland, Turner began plans for a composition of boats becalmed, creating a number of sketches in a leather-bound notebook similar in size to one also on view in this exhibition. The present painting, completed the following year as the result of his studies, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London alongside a painting of the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo. In contrast to that scene of destruction, Turner shows in Dort—both through the subject matter of the many well-cared-for boats, the well-fed passengers, and the calm waters of the Merwede River, and in the glowing, even light depicted in the painting—that peace was as central to the flowering of artistic creation in the Romantic period as the wars that shook the Continent.