Calm, 1812 (JMW Turner)

JMW Turner; Calm
© Tate Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported),
The original can be viewed at the Tate by clicking here.
1812

I don't mean to turn this into the JMW Turner Draws Men On Boats Blog or a study of fishermen's clothing - though the notions have a certain appeal - but once again a great print from Turner's "Liber Studiorum" pulled me back. In it fishermen drift on a glassy sea, their spread sails hanging limply. The aquatint/mezzotint process and warm ink gives the scene considerable depth, with the boats in the background shown in lighter tones, while the fishermen appear almost black.

Detail from JMW Turner's "Calm"
©Tate Photographic Rights ©Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported),
The original can be viewed at the Tate by clicking here.
1812

I haven't seen any knit caps in the artwork I've been studying so far (largely caricatures from 1797-1807, so a fairly limited slice of nautical art, to be fair), so the cap in "Marine Dabblers" and today's print have stuck out. The waterman's long queue is striking as well.

The unusual clothing and the contents of the rest of the Liber Studiorum make me suspect that this might be a painting of continental fishermen and thus perhaps not appropriate to include with the rest of my English-speaking sailor content, so I'm not tagging it in with everything else and am including using it as an end-of-the-month "outside the usual subject matter" posts.