Today we return to the marine art of JMW Turner in the collection of the Tate with scene from the first decade of the 19th century, done first as a watercolor in 1808 and later issued as a engraving in 1811. In the foreground young boys play in the surf next to a boat run up on the shore, contrasted to the adult fishermen in the background. To quote
the Tate's catalog entry, "The anxiety of the child at the loss of a toy in the shallows foreshadows the dangers of setting out in real boats, to which the men shown in the background are accustomed".
I've avoided featuring images of watermen or coastal fishermen because there are sartorial differences between them and bluewater sailors, but the lure of Turner was once again too much for me: not only does the Tate have Turner's original watercolor, but both the preliminary outline etching and the final published version of this print survive, with the final, published print engraved by a different artist.
Together these three images show subtle differences in the interpretation of the sailor's clothing in the scene, and a useful lesson on the over-reliance on an artist's brush-strokes or etching-lines when studying clothing.
This is Turner's original watercolor, completed in 1808. The sketch was done in Indian Red pigment as a series of washes, with some washing-out used for the figures. The four boys play in the surf at the foreground, and off to the right are the two adults that grabbed my interest.
It's a little difficult to tell what the men are wearing because of the nature of the washes; the figure on the left standing in the surf half-turned to the viewer appears to be wearing a striped knit cap, a light-colored shirt with full sleeves, petticoat breeches, and a bulk leg covering that look like trousers. The figure on the right, with his back pushed up against the boat, wears a cap, white shirt, light-colored waistcoat, and slops over some sort of leg covering.
Next I turn to Turner's preliminary etching, which offers more clarity in the sharp lines of an etched plate but less detail in terms of shading and some of the garments, but the leg-coverings of the men now look like gaiters worn over breeches.
Finally I turn to the published engraving, which was engraved by another artist, William Say. This bears much more similarity to the original watercolor due to its shading, but even more detail in the sailor's clothes.
Both knit caps look striped, and the sailor on the left's petticoat breeches look horizontally striped. The detail of the gaiters over the breeches is largely lost.
Although this post is perhaps not extremely interesting from the perspective of the costume historian, I nonetheless enjoyed seeing Turner's artistic process, especially when the process gives me insight into studying sailor's clothing in art.
