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This unfinished painting of Brest is now recognized as the third, along with Dieppe and Cologne, in a series of northern European ports with which it shares a similar palette and scale. The painting was rediscovered in the basement of the National Gallery, London, in the early 1940s, and its subject was more recently identified by the exhibition’s co-curator, Ian Warrell, based on cursory sketches from one of Turner’s trips to France. As in Dieppe, the viewer looks down a golden path of light on water to the sun, with elements of the city’s architecture on either side. At left, under the Château de Brest, a mass of figures stands on the pier, some in traditional Breton costume. Barely visible are the outlines of a masting station, a wooden crane fixed to the quayside, which Turner painted out. The painting offers an illuminating view into Turner’s working methods in his grand harbor scenes. He laid in the composition with areas of diluted oil paint — in tones of blue, orange, yellow, and ocher — applied thinly over a white absorbent ground. The forms of buildings, boats, and figures were then developed through modeling in light and dark.

In this imagined port scene, painted shortly after Turner abandoned work on The Harbor of Brest, the artist treats a subject uniquely suited to his brilliant effects of light. Its title alludes to an often-told episode of ancient history in which the Roman general Marcus Atilius Regulus was forced by his Carthaginian captors to stare at the sun until it blinded him. Here, the hero is barely perceptible, reduced to a few pale brushstrokes at the top of the stairway at right. In searching for Regulus, the viewer experiences his fate, forced to stare at the blazing light radiating across sky and sea. By depicting the story of a man blinded by the sun, Turner was issuing a defiant response to the criticism that had been leveled against the intense luminosity of Harbor of Dieppe and Cologne.

In the mid-ground on the left side of this image, tiny figures bow to greet Agrippina the Elder, virtuous widow of the assassinated general Germanicus. Although the citizens of Rome hailed her return, it marked the beginning of a dark period, during which the empire was ruled by tyrants: Agrippina’s son, Caligula, and grandson, Nero. Turner alludes to this tragic undercurrent, and to Rome’s eventual decline, with the presence of the moon at daytime. It hovers above the scene, even as warm sunlight spreads over the city and glimmers across the surface of the river.

Townspeople go about their everyday tasks on the banks outside the gates of this small town located on the Rhine, upriver from Cologne. Details such as a daydreaming man smoking his pipe stand out amid the bustle of activity. This sheet was part of the series of fifty-one watercolors depicting towns and monuments along the Rhine that Turner painted for his patron and friend Walter Fawkes after returning from his first trip to the Rhineland in 1817.

Most likely an imagined view, this image combines some of the river’s most distinctive picturesque traits — its winding path and steep gorges. Logging was one of the region’s major commercial enterprises, with lumber transported on extended rafts for processing and distribution. Though this raft is relatively small, in travel journals from the period, British tourists marveled at rafts up to a thousand feet long.

As a child, Turner spent time in Margate, a fishing village and resort in Kent that he returned to throughout his life. He created numerous works of the picturesque town, of which this is the largest watercolor. Turner places the sun directly in front of the viewer and fills the scene with its radiant glow. A few passing ships with animated figures on board ripple the calm water.

In this glowing watercolor of Stangate Creek, within the Medway estuary, Turner balances the open area on the left with a cluster of boats in the foreground on the right. The dark silhouettes of floating hulks or decommissioned men-of-war converted into inspection stations for cargo on incoming trade ships add a note of mystery. According to an inscription on an engraver’s proof, Turner instructed the engraver Thomas Lupton to replace the logs in the foreground with a buoy.

Turner captures the congestion of his native city, which was then emerging as a major commercial hub. Throngs of sailors and fisherman, as well as commercial goods, seem to spill out of the image in the foreground. In the distance, a barge has been forced to lower its mast in order to pass beneath the low arches of Old London Bridge, by then obsolete. The bridge was demolished a few years later, in 1830.

By the nineteenth century, Brighton (traditionally known as Brighthelmston) was one of England’s most fashionable resorts, as well as the departure point for the cross-Channel ferry to Dieppe. Featured in this watercolor are the chain pier at right (where the ferry boats docked) and King George IV’s Indian-style Royal Pavilion on the shore, both completed the previous year. Turner’s soft washes of watercolor are translated into sharp hatching in the engraving. The rainbow in the sky also becomes more pronounced.

Turner captures in a few brushstrokes Cologne’s skyline as seen from Deutz, the small town on the opposite bank of the river. The diagonal line of dark brushstrokes cutting across the water suggests the floating bridge (wooden planks across a row of pontoons) that was introduced in 1822 to connect the two cities. Among the many church towers that punctuate Cologne’s skyline, the spire of Gross St. Martin — which would later serve as the focal point of Turner’s oil — rises above the others.

This vista of the naval dockyard of Devonshire, on the southwestern coast of England, includes tent-shaped buildings that were used for the construction of men-of-war. Set in the period following the Napoleonic Wars, ships are being discharged and soldiers relieved from service. The brilliant golden light pushing away the dark storm clouds has been interpreted as an allegory of the coming peace.

In this view of the Grande Rue, the avenue that leads to Dieppe’s interior, Turner focuses on the grandeur of the city’s architecture. With careful attention to light and shadow, the buildings’ geometric forms are evoked in diffuse, overlapping bands of yellow, pink, and purple pigments. In Harbor of Dieppe, this thoroughfare is seen in the background, thronged with people.

The light emitted by the moon and torches in this imaginative night view of Mont-St.-Michel creates an eerie glow that contrasts with the luminous sheets of the other two works from The English Channel series in the show — Le Havre and The Jute. In the foreground, beneath the looming architecture of the medieval abbey, French officers arrest smugglers on the flat sands exposed by the low tide.

Located in the Midlands of central England — also known as the Black Country due to the pollution — Dudley in Turner’s time was undergoing rapid transformation into an industrial hub. The aligned smokestack and church steeple structure the image around the contrast of past and present. Turner subsumes the entire scene in a haze of smog by wetting the paper before applying watercolor, creating a view of industry that is at once romantic and oppressive.

Turner uses animated brushwork and a cool color palette to create an almost abstract image of London. The dark cloud on the right, once thought to have been smoke from a fire, is now seen as the polluting trail of a steamboat, faintly visible in front of the arches of London Bridge. Figures become ghostly silhouettes against a view of the harbor transformed by the rapid rise of steam power.