A cross-Channel packet boat, crowded with passengers and flying a British flag, heads for the port of Calais through rough, dark water, while small French fishing boats push out the other way. A shaft of sunlight breaks through the storm clouds to light the white sail at the center. In the lower right, a little fishing boat struggles to get away from the pier before it is battered against it, and women watch from the windswept wooden pier. On 15 July 1802, aged 27, Joseph Mallord William Turner set off on his first trip abroad, crossing from Dover to Calais in a packet like this one, in stormy weather.

His sketchbook note reads, "Our landing at Calais. Nearly swampt." He exhibited the picture at the Royal Academy in 1803 as Calais Pier, with French Poissards preparing for Sea: an English Packet arriving. The reception was mixed, the National Gallery says, and began a run of critical disapproval that lasted until his death. Critics compared his thick, palette-knife paint in the foam to blots, batter and pea soup, while John Ruskin later saw the first sign of Turner's "colossal power" in it.

It stayed unsold in his possession and came to the nation in the Turner Bequest in 1856. It is in the National Gallery in London.