Fishing Boats With Hucksters Bargaining For Fish By William Fisher

Fishing Boats with Hucksters Bargaining for Fish by William Turner was painted in 1837 to 1838. It is a work of oil on canvas, with a large size of 68-¾ in by 88-½ in. The painting presents an imagery of boats sailing in the sea while two groups of people trading fish. Through the use of light and dark contrast, the combination of cool and warm colors, Turner successfully captured both the feeling of calm and fierce, created a dramatic tension in an everyday scene of fish bargaining.
The first subject matter draws the viewer’s eyes is the main fishing boat on the left, there are people, probably fishermen sitting in the boat, the white sail pops out in a darker sky background, a life raft is dragging next to the boat, therefore guides the eyes to another boat with sail behind it; next to the other boat, there is a ship with grey scale color, blend in with the background. If one comes really close, there is a tiny ship with steam come out of its pipe from far back, sailing on the edge between water and sky. This steam ship then leads the eyes back to the middle
The space is successfully illustrated with this clever composition. The spatial relationship is also showed with the color difference, size and details. The color gets grey and almost blends together with the sky, the amount of detail is not as much as the boats in the middle ground. The farthest steam ship is just painted with several brushstrokes. The contrast in size is what gives this painting a dramatic spatial relationship: The buoy in the foreground is almost the same size with the raft behind it, and the steam ship in the far back is the same size as a person on the raft. All three of the subjects are arranged in a straight line, the contrast in size is so dramatic in this way that the audiences can sense how everything is actually far away from one