Dutch boats plunge through a rough sea beneath a heavy, dark sky. The boat at the center heels over, its pale sail swollen by the wind, and it seems about to collide with a second boat while the crews struggle to steer clear. Spray and foam churn white around the hulls, and another ship waits far off at the right. Joseph Mallord William Turner painted it in 1801 for Francis Egerton, Duke of Bridgewater, a wealthy coal and canal magnate who wanted a seascape to hang beside a picture he already owned, Ships on a Stormy Sea by Willem van de Velde the Younger.

Turner reversed that composition, made his canvas much larger and its sea far angrier, and was paid £250, the highest sum he had yet received for an oil painting. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1801, it drew crowds and secured his reputation, and it has been known ever since as The Bridgewater Sea Piece. Fellow artists compared it with a Rembrandt storm on the Sea of Galilee, and in 1837 both paintings went on view at the British Institution, where critics disagreed over which was finer. It is in the National Gallery in London, on loan from The Capricorn Foundation.