Fawkes hung it in his drawing room at Farnley Hall, Yorkshire, on the same wall as The Victory Returning from Trafalgar (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut).

This suggestion, together with the present drawing in a sketchbook whose marine subjects were all or mainly drawn at Portsmouth or Spithead in 1807 when Turner went to see the arrival of Danish ships seized at Copenhagen (see Introduction), provides the only evidence for the date of the picture. 2 This second version has been associated with one of two pictures shown in Turner’s Gallery in 1809 with the same title, Fishing Boats in a Calm, which are not otherwise traced. The first (National Gallery, London) 1 was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1807, and may have prompted Turner’s patron Walter Fawkes to suggest the second, smaller version of a similar subject, a man-of-war in a morning calm seen from a shore with fishermen cleaning or selling fish (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham).

This sketch served as the basis for the second of Turner’s two pictures now known by the same title, The Sun Rising through Vapour.

Image of the sun rising