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Turner was deeply interested in modern technology and particularly fascinated by steamboats, which appealed to him for both aesthetic and practical reasons. First introduced in Britain in 1801, the steamboat was established as a form of public transportation in 1812 and rapidly became widespread. Turner made frequent sketching tours in Britain and on the Continent, and the development of steam navigation enabled him to travel more widely and rapidly. The artist was often exercised by the problem of depicting “the wavy air, as some call the wind,” as he noted in one of his sketchbooks; the black smoke produced by steamboats, however, enabled Turner to track the movement of air currents in addition to offering a vehicle for articulating a new poetics of modernity (Taft, 2001). The steamship recurred frequently in Turner’s work from the early 1820s, often apparently celebrating technological progress, though appearing sinister or even demonic, and sometimes pitted against the forces of nature. Critics were initially skeptical about the appropriateness of steamboats as a subject for art, but by 1836 a writer in the “Quarterly Review” was praising Turner for introducing “a new instance of the beautiful” (Rodner, 1997, p. 45). In this drawing the steamer is shown sailing heroically in a menacing storm, the extremity of the weather underscored by Turner's bravura use of scratching out to denote the flash of lightning and the foam under the steamer’s paddles. Both the date and the subject of this bold and atmospheric watercolor are uncertain. Andrew Wilton has plausibly suggested that the location is the Lake of Lucerne (Wilton, “Turner”, 1980, p. 183); Judy Egerton has less convincingly connected the drawing to Turner’s 1830 visit to Staffa, and a third possibility is that the drawing is a view of the Lagoon and relates to his 1840 stay in Venice. Technically, the watercolor is similar to Turner’s work of the early 1840s, and this dating seems most likely.