The painting captures a precise, momentary change in the weather. The flags on an anchored man o' war show the wind blowing steadily from left to right, while the ferry boat named in the title is bowled along under full sail by a sudden gust from somewhere on shore. A two-masted vessel in the middle distance fares worse, caught by the same changeable wind and struggling as its sails flap, with a rearing bank of rain cloud announcing the shift^[1]. Turner gave as much of the canvas to the sky as to the sea, so much so that later writers have argued his Dutch-themed marine paintings of this period are better described as cloudscapes than as straightforward marines^[1].

Rotterdam Ferry-Boat belongs to a group of roughly seven paintings on Dutch themes that Turner produced between 1831 and 1833, drawing directly on the seventeenth-century marine painters Jan van Goyen and Willem van de Velde the Elder and Younger^[2]. Turner's affection for Dutch art went back to his youth: he later credited a mezzotint copy of a van de Velde seascape, showing a man o' war caught in a squall, with making him a painter in the first place, and when he visited the Louvre for the first time in 1802 he sought out the Dutch master Jacob van Ruisdael in particular, writing detailed, critical notes on two of his paintings^[2]. That early, close study of Dutch technique, tonality and composition stayed with Turner and resurfaced repeatedly across his career, this group of Rotterdam and Dutch harbour scenes among the clearest examples.

Turner had first-hand knowledge of the places he painted in this period. He crossed to the continent in August 1817, sailing via Ostend and returning home from Rotterdam to Harwich, and he travelled to Holland again in 1825^[3]. Unlike many of the more sweeping Italian subjects he pursued around the same years, these Dutch works were grounded in a country he had actually walked through and sailed past, and art historians have pointed to a further, contemporary motivation behind the sequence: Britain's foreign secretary allowed Belgium to secede from the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830 to 1831 against Dutch wishes, weakening Holland economically and politically, and Turner, who had come to love the country through its landscape and its painters, sided instinctively with the Dutch and felt they had been betrayed^[1].