Probably painted in 1792, when the artist was just 17 years old, this dramatic, recently rediscovered coastal landscape is the first oil painting that J.M.W. Turner ever exhibited. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1793, it is based on an on-the-spot drawing found in Turner’s Bristol and Malmesbury sketchbook, used on a tour of the West Country in 1791, and a related watercolour of the following year (figs 1 and 2; both Turner Bequest, Tate Britain, London). It was bought by, and possibly painted for, the Rev. Robert Nixon of Foots Cray, a friend and early supporter of Turner, with whom the artist used to stay. By tradition, Nixon was among the first to encourage the young artist to pursue oil painting and the earliest biographies record that it was in his house that Turner’s first oil was painted. Not seen in public since 1864, when it was offered at auction in London, it has remained for over a century and a half in a private collection, unseen and overlooked by scholars.

Until recently the prevailing belief had been that Turner’s earliest exhibited oil was a painting now known as Fishermen at Sea, Tate Britain (fig. 3), which he exhibited at the Royal Academy three years later in 1796. Despite early mention of the existence of this picture in obituaries of the artist’s life and some posthumous literary references, the confusion lies, in large part, in the fact that for at least a century this painting has been mistaken in the literature for a watercolour. As such it has been absent from the catalogue of exhibited oil paintings by Turner and discourse of his work. Its re-emergence now, in the 250th anniversary year of Turner’s birth, allows us to appreciate the startling ambition of this great artist at such an early moment in his career, by which stage he is already demonstrating a level of confidence and competency in oil painting far beyond what was previously known.

The composition is based on a drawing of Hot Wells House in Bristol, found on p. 3 in Turner’s Bristol and Malmsbery sketchbook (fig. 1). Turner used this sketchbook—which Ruskin described, not quite accurately, as ‘the youngest book’—on a tour of the West Country in 1791, when he was just sixteen years old. A hot spring and spa, built on a rocky promontory called Hotwell Point that protruded into the River Avon, the building was a popular attraction in Georgian England. The view is taken from the east bank of the River Avon, where the Clifton Suspension Bridge now spans the river, looking south, upstream, at the back of a clutter of buildings that Turner had also depicted from the opposite bank in two watercolours of the same year (one Bristol Museum and Art Gallery; the other The Courtauld, London; fig. 4).¹ Turner inscribed the drawing ‘Back view of the Hot Wells from Gloucestershire side’ in a formal script, as he did with a number of other sketches in the book (which Wilton suggests indicated he was planning to produce a series of engraved views of the Avon Gorge), and the following year worked it up into a watercolour (Tate Britain).²

Turner evolved the composition through the watercolour, adapting the topographical elements of the original view he had recorded on the spot and simplifying the architectural detail. The young artist romanticises the subject by, for example, changing the low building in the foreground from a tiled to a thatched roof; shortening the sea wall to introduce a rockier shoreline; and introducing animated figures and a cluster of wave-rocked fishing boats to lend a sense of urgency to the composition. In the oil he takes this romanticism a stage further, almost subsuming parts of the foreground building within the cascading foliage of rockface behind and enveloping the buildings in tempestuous dark clouds. The cluster of storm tossed boats seen here have also evolved from the simpler configuration in the watercolour, now tossed quite violently on the squally sea; whilst the earlier gesticulating figure on the path has been replaced in the painting by a running man with his arms raised in alarm, which Turner adopts from a sheet of figure studies he made in 1792–93, Tate Britain (fig. 5).³ The same figure features in a watercolour that belongs to a series of small coastal scenes Turner painted in this period that all show the strong influence of de Loutherbourg (fig. 6).

These share many compositional affinities with the present painting, not least in the craggy rocky shoreline and tempestuous atmospheric effects. It is a bold choice of subject, with a jumbled, not obviously picturesque cluster of buildings that demonstrates an early interest in characterful architecture that would remain a theme throughout Turner’s art, as well as presaging the adoption of a compositional ploy that was to be characteristic of the artist’s work. As Wilton has recently commented, throughout his life Turner would group sails of ships jostling in overlapping patterns, very much as he presents the buildings here, and this earliest of paintings ‘is a fascinating document of the young artist’s mind and ambitions at a crucial moment in his development’, demonstrating ‘the feverish inventiveness of an adolescent bursting with ideas that mark him out as an inventor, already a clearly original mind’.⁴

As Eric Shanes has previously documented, Turner spent much time in the period 1792–93 in the studio of the French émigré painter Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, to the extent that the latter’s wife, according to Thornbury, ‘grew very jealous of Turner’s frequent visits to her husband, and that at last suspecting the young painter was obtaining all her husband’s secrets from him, on his next visit she shut the door in his face and roughly refused him admittance.’⁵ As de Loutherbourg was not a watercolourist, any technical ‘secrets’ he may have imparted to the young Turner cannot have involved that medium. Turner must therefore have been seeking the elder artist’s assistance in the use of oil paint. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to find that Turner was experimenting in this medium at precisely this period, nor that his efforts, as shown in this painting, demonstrate the strong influence of de Loutherbourg’s style (fig. 7).

The 1793 Royal Academy exhibition, which opened on 26 April, three days after his eighteenth birthday, was something of a bellwether moment for Turner. One of his other exhibits that year, Gate of St Augustine’s monastery, Canterbury was arguably the most advanced British watercolour ever created. Made up of no fewer than sixty-one tones, spanning ten different colours, Turner had obviously put an extraordinary effort into creating so rich and complex a watercolour and, in doing so, was clearly laying down a challenge to his contemporaries, consciously outdoing Michaelangelo Rooker’s Battle Abbey-gate of the previous year, with its forty-four tones and five colours. It was also this year that he stopped giving his address in the exhibition catalogue as ‘26 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden’, the address of his father’s barber shop (through which his studio was accessed by visitors), instead listing it as ‘Hand-court, Maiden Lane, Covent Garden’, distinguishing himself from his father’s hairdressing premises and directing prospective clients to a separate doorway that would make him look the complete professional. For this to be the year that he exhibited his first oil painting is entirely in keeping with the intense creative focus that his activities that year demonstrated, as well as the sense of challenge that was beginning to emerge in his art at the time.

Contemporary commentators were clearly struck by the young artist’s dramatic emergence on the British art scene and noted the new ambition and artistic feeling from so young an artist in this picture. Years later, in their obituary of Turner’s life, the critic for The Athenaeum remembered The Rising Squall as a ‘subject in which he threw aside the trammels of architectural detail caught from the school of Mr. Dayes, and evinced for the first time that mastery of effect for which he is now justly celebrated’; noting also that ‘artists who remarked the drawing [i.e. the design/ handling] at the time, and with whom we have talked on the subject of Turner’s early works, were accustomed to speak of this early picture as one in which a common subject was treated with a poet’s eye and a painter’s hand’.⁶ Cunningham, writing a year after the artist’s death, wrote eloquently that at the time of its exhibition this painting was ‘recognised by the wiser few as a noble attempt at lifting landscape art out of the tame insipidities of Zuccarelli, and the Smiths of Chichester, bearing indications, as I am assured it did, that the school of landscape art in this country, which Wilson founded, and Gainsborough supported, was about to be maintained and perhaps strengthened by the genius of a young artist, of whom nothing more was known than that he was the son of a Turner, a barber, and a good one withal, in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden’.⁷ Such prophetic sentiments were also echoed by the brothers Richard and Samuel Redgrave, in their two-volume A century of painters of the English School, published in 1866, who, writing in reference to Turner’s 1793 exhibits, noted that ‘Turner’s genius was not of a nature to allow him long to continue painting simply representative landscapes, or to treat his subjects merely topographically. In 1793, we note the first indication of an attempt to treat his picture as modified or changed by passing atmospheric effects’.⁸

Walter Thornbury, in his biography of Turner’s life, describes how it was ‘in the parsonage at Foot’s-Cray, the house of the father of Dr Nixon, the present Bishop of Tasmania, that Turner’s first oil picture (according to this tradition) was finished… with fishermen drawing their boats ashore in a gale of wind’ (though, knowing of the picture only third hand, he incorrectly identified the topographical subject). Contemporaries, he comments, particularly noted that it bore ‘a strong resemblance to de Loutherbourg’ and that it was ‘carefully and thinly painted, with thin scumbles of semi-opaque colour’ in the manner of ‘the experienced watercolour painter using a new and denser material’. Whilst this description perfectly matches the way that this painting is handled, it also identifies an idiosyncratic technique that would mark Turner out for the rest of his career. For it was precisely his application of the techniques of watercolour painting to the use of oil paint, with successive layers of thin, wetly applied glazes of translucent colour that, over time, allowed him to gradually deconstruct his landscapes, bleeding the forms together in rich, hazy effects of light, and, in the process, revolutionising the art of painting.

Despite these early references, and an article of 1856 in The Art Journal identifying 1793 as the year Turner exhibited his first oil at the Academy, subsequent literary references to this picture became confused. The painting was clearly not widely known. None of the scholars writing in the later 19th century would have been alive in 1793 to see it exhibited at the Academy, and since then it had remained in a private collection, for many years on the other side of the world—having been exported and only publicly exhibited in Tasmania. Thornbury, who was relaying information from ‘one who has seen it’, as already referred to, and Thomas Miller, writing in 1862 and 1873 respectively, both mistook the subject for Rochester Castle, which Turner had also drawn in 1792.⁹ More damagingly, however, in the Redgrave brothers’ 1866 Century of painters of the English School, they mistakenly implied that the exhibited painting was a watercolour. However, in 1878, Samuel Redgrave, in his Dictionary of Artists of the English School, corrected this mistake, having presumably seen or been made aware of the painting which, having gone unsold at Christie’s in 1864, was likely still with the dealer Joseph Hogarth in his gallery at 96 Mount Street. Redgrave specifically states that ‘in 1793 he [Turner] exhibited in oil, ‘The Rising Squall’, in which the poetry of nature was attempted’.¹⁰ In 1889 the poet and art critic William Cosmo Monkhouse acknowledged Redgrave’s statement, and Gilbert Redgrave, the former’s nephew, repeated the assertion in 1892. Confusion was clearly already endemic, however, and other scholars were by now entrenched in the opinion that Turner exhibited his first oil in 1796. With erroneous references to a ‘lost oil’ of Rochester Castle and past descriptions of The Rising Squall as a watercolour, the muddled situation is understandable.

The error was cemented, however, by the eminent art historian Charles Francis Bell, the first Keeper of the Fine Art Department at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, in his seminal 1901 List of the works contributed to public exhibitions by J.M.W. Turner, R.A., who made a critical mistake that was to define the untraced painting’s perception for the next century and a quarter. Under his entry for this painting, which he catalogued as a watercolour, on p. 27, Bell commented: ‘Messrs. Redgrave, in their Dictionary of Artists of the English School describe this as an oil-picture; they correct the statement in their Century of Painters of the English School’. It is clear from this statement that he confused the order of the two books, implying that the Dictionary of Artists (published in 1878) was written before A Century of Painters (which was first published in 1866), when in fact the opposite is true. The likely reason for this error is that a second edition of A Century of Painters was republished in 1890, with no amendments to the earlier text, thereby perpetuating the inaccuracy of the original 1866 version. Bell, however, seems to have mistaken this earlier inaccuracy for a later revision and concluded that The Rising Squall was in fact a watercolour. It is that mistake which would see this painting excluded from the catalogue of Turner’s oil paintings for the next century and a quarter (although sporadic, inaccurate references to it as an untraced view of Rochester Castle do occur), until publication of its rediscovery was announced by Andrew Wilton in the 250th anniversary year of the painter’s birth.

Note on Provenance
Part of the reason for the longevity of this misclassification lies in the nature of the painting’s provenance; tucked away in a private collection, unseen by the public and eluding the attention of scholars, who were not even looking for a ‘lost’ oil. The painting was bought directly from Turner following its exhibition in 1793 by his friend and early supporter, the Rev. Robert Nixon of Foots Cray, with whom the artist used sometimes to stay. Nixon was a customer of Turner’s father and, it is said, was struck on one of his visits by some watercolours the barber had hung on the shop wall done by his son. By tradition, Nixon was among the first to encourage the young artist to pursue oil painting and, as Wilton suggests, probably bought this early painting to assist Turner in his career.¹¹ He also bought several other early pictures from Turner, including another oil, a View of Mt Snowdon, North Wales,¹² and three watercolours.

Following Nixon’s death in 1837, the painting was inherited, together with the rest of his collection of works by Turner, by his son, the Rev. Dr Francis Russell Nixon, who was himself an artist and early photographer. In 1842 Francis was appointed first Lord Bishop of Tasmania and took the painting with him to Australasia. It would therefore have accompanied him on board ship when, having been consecrated in Westminster Abbey, he set sail with his wife and children, their governess and Archdeacon Fitzherbert Marriott, in the Duke of Roxburgh in August that year. The ship stopped at Cape Town, where he confirmed four hundred souls, consecrated a church and ordained a priest, before arriving at Hobart Town in July 1843, following an eleven-month voyage. We know this as Bishop Nixon lent the painting, along with the other pictures inherited from his father, to two exhibitions held in Hobart in the mid-19th century. In a sign of the gradual obscurity into which this important early oil painting was already beginning to slide, in the earlier of these exhibitions it was catalogued as Landscape (The Rising Squall), but by the second was labelled simply as Landscape.

Described as ‘a remarkable man both in appearance and character, good-looking, coal-black hair… devoted to the fine arts and a beautiful draughtsman’, Bishop Nixon lived firstly in Upper Davey Street. After three years in Hobart he moved to Boa Vista in Argyle Street, and in 1850 he bought Runnymede at New Town, renaming it Bishopstowe. Twenty years of pioneering took their toll, however, and in 1862 he returned to England due to ill health. He was given the important living of Bolton Percy, in Yorkshire, but his health did not improve, and in 1865 he retired to Vignolo on Lake Maggiore, Italy, where he died on 7 April 1879 and was buried in the British cemetery at Stresa.

At some point following his return to England Bishop Nixon sold the painting, together with his other oil by Turner, to the art dealer and print seller Joseph Hogarth (1801–1879), who consigned both to Christie’s in London for sale in July 1864. Listed as lot 152, on 11 July 1864, in the ‘Pictures’ section of the sale catalogue, this picture was catalogued as ‘The Hotwells, Bristol: storm coming on, fishermen securing their boats’, and the entry specifically notes that both works were ‘painted for the Rev. J. [sic] Nixon./ From the Collection of Dr Nixon, late Bishop of Tasmania’. Bought in at the auction, the painting has remained untraced ever since.

We are grateful to Cecilia Powell, Joyce Townshend, Ian Warrell and Andrew Wilton for their assistance in the cataloguing of this lot. As mentioned under Literature, this painting has been requested for loan to the forthcoming exhibition Turner and Constable at Tate Britain, London, from 27 November 2025 – 12 April 2026—the definitive exhibition of two pivotal British artists in the 250^th year of their births.

¹ Hotwell Point was removed in the 1860s to straighten the river and today the A4 runs where the house once stood.

² Turner Bequest XXIII 0; D00389.

³ Turner Bequest XXIII X; D00398.

⁴ Wilton 2025, pp. 4–5.

⁵ Quoted in E. Shanes, Young Mr Turner, New Haven and London 2016, p. 66.

⁶ Athenaeum obituary, 27 December 1851.

⁷ Cunningham 1852, pp. 17–18.

⁸ Redgrave 1866, p. 96.

⁹ Rochester Castle from the River Medway, 1792; pencil and watercolour on paper, 21.2 x 26.9 cm., Turner Bequest XV-D.

¹⁰ Redgrave 1878, p. 437.

¹¹ Wilton 2025, p. 3.

¹² Last recorded by Armstrong in 1902 under the title Snowdon: Wagoners—Early Morning, in the collection of R. Hall MacCormick, Esq. in Chicago.