In this appreciation we can go all the way with Ruskin. 'The Snowstorm' in its new home in the new Turner Gallery looks the work of a giant in the interpretation of sea-motion, mist and light.
The 'Snowstorm; Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth making Signals in shallow water and going by the lead,' was laughed at by the press when it was shown in the 1842 Academy. The parody of the title that appeared in Punch was almost funny; but the old man did not think it funny: 'A Typhoon bursting in a Simoon over the Whirlpool of Maelstrom, Norway; with a ship on fire, an eelipse, and the effect of a lunar rainbow,' with the following skit on the Fallacies of Hope:—
'O Art, how vast thy mighty wonders are
To those who roam upon the extraordinary deep;
Maelstrom, thy hand is here,'
Plate XXXIII. The Snow Storm (1842)
Thornbury asserts that the critics of all kinds, learned and unlearned, were furious when it was exhibited; some of them described it as a mass of 'soapsuds and whitewash.'
'Turner,' wrote Ruskin, 'was passing the evening at my father's house, on the day this criticism came out; and after dinner, sitting in his arm-chair by the fire, I heard him muttering low to himself, at intervals, "Soapsuds and whitewash" again, and again, and again. At last I went to him, asking why he minded what they said. Then he burst out, "Soapsuds and whitewash! What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea's like? I wish they'd been in it."'
As a matter of fact, Turner had given himself infinitely more trouble over 'The Snowstorm' than over 'The Fighting Téméraire,' and he had been in considerable danger. To paint 'The Snowstorm,' he had put to sea from Harwich in the Ariel in a hurricane, had made the sailors lash him to the mast, and there the student of sixty-seven remained for four hours studying the awful scene. I look at 'The Snowstorm' to-day, and remember. I am filled with awe at the man's power. No, we do not smile at 'The Snowstorm' now; but certain folk still smile at 'War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet,' depicting an attenuated Napoleon, standing against a blood-red sunset, in the shallows of a tidal pool, on the shore of St. Helena, gazing with folded arms out to sea. Turner failed to make this nobly inspired dream a reality—that is all.