Art History Today

“When the news reached Athens…”

"When the news reached Athens, for a long time people would not believe it, even though they were given precise information from the very soldiers who had been present at the event and had escaped; still they thought that this total destruction was something that could not possibly be true. And when they did recognise the facts, they turned against the public speakers who had been in favour of the expedition, as though they themselves had not voted for it, and also became angry with the prophets and soothsayers and all who at the time had, by various methods of divination, encouraged them to believe that they would conquer Sicily.”

Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War.

Slide list for Apocalyptic Sublime lecture

1) John Hamilton Mortimer, Death on a Pale Horse, 1775, pen and black ink and gray ink on moderately thick, moderately textured, cream wove paper, Yale Centre for British Art.

2) Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1498, woodcut, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

3) Benjamin West, Death on a Pale Horse, 1796, oil on canvas, 23 ½ x 50 ½ inches, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.

4) Phillipe de Loutherbourg, Vision of the White Horse, 1798, oil on canvas, 48 x 31 inches, Tate, London.

5) William Blake, Death on a Pale Horse, about 1800, w/c, Fitzwilliam, Cambridge.

6) J.M.W. Turner, Death on a Pale Horse, 1825-30, oil on canvas, Tate, London.

7) Eugene Delacroix, Lightning startling a Horse, 1825-29, watercolour, lead white on paper, Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest.

8) George Stubbs, Lion attacking a Horse, about 1762, oil on canvas, 94 1/4 x 58 in, Yale Centre for British Art.

9) J.M.W. Turner, The Tenth Plague of Egypt, 1802, oil on canvas, 143.5 x 236.2 cm, Tate, London.

10) Richard Wilson, The Destruction of Niobe’s Children, 1760, oil on canvas, 65.51 in x 82.99 in, Yale Centre for British Art.

11) Nicolas Poussin, The Deluge, 1660-64, oil on canvas, 118 x 160 cm, Museé du Louvre, Paris.

12) J.M.W. Turner, The Deluge, 1805, oil on canvas, 142.9 x 235.6 cm, Tate, London.

13) Anne Louis Girodet, The Deluge, Salon of 1806, oil on canvas, 441 x 341 cm. Museé du Louvre, Paris.

14) Francis Danby, The Israelites Delivered out of Egypt, 1825, oil on canvas, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston.

15) John Martin, The Evening of the Deluge, 1828, mezzotint and engraving, 597 x 817 mm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

16) Villa Diodati, near Lake Geneva, Switzerland.

17) John Martin, Manfred and the Alpine Witch, 1837, watercolour, 388 x 558 mm, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.

18) Francis Danby, The Precipice, c. 1827, oil on panel, 17 ½ x 13 ¾ inches, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, (sold in 1894 as “Death of an Alpine Hunter”).

19) Philip James de Loutherbourg, A Waterspout in the Mountains of Switzerland, 1809, oil on canvas, 106.7 x 157.5 cms, N.T., Petworth House.

20) J.M.W. Turner, The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons, 1810, oil on canvas, 90.2 x 120 cm, Tate, London.

21) J.M.W. Turner and Charles Turner after J.M.W. Turner, The Fifth Plague of Egypt, 1803, engraving, Yale Centre for British Art.

22) J.S. Cotman, Bedlam Furnace, near Madeley, 1802, w/c, 26 x 47 inches, Private Collection.

23) John Martin, The Great Day of his Wrath, 1851-53, oil on canvas, 197 x 303 cm, Tate, London.

24) John Martin, Belshazzar’s Feast, 1821, oil on canvas, 95.3 x 120.6 cm, Yale Centre for British Art.

25) John Martin, Fall of Nineveh, 1828, oil on canvas, location unknown.

26) Joseph Wright of Derby, Arkwright’s Cotton Mill by Night, 1782, oil on canvas 99.7 x 125.7 cm Private Collection.

27) After George Walker, A Collier and Blenkinsop’s locomotive, 1814, from “The Costume of Yorkshire, “lithograph printed in colour, Walton Hall, Yorkshire.

28) Joseph Constantine Stadler, The Dannemoor Coal Mine, 1809, aquatint.

29) John Martin, The Hollow Deep of Hell, 1826, illustration for “Paradise Lost,” mezzotint.

30) Frontispiece to Paradise Lost with portrait of Milton, 1667, British Library.

31) John Martin, At the Brink of Chaos, illustration from Paradise Lost, mezzotint, 1826.

32) Thomas Telford, Menai Bridge, Angelsey, 1826.

33) Anon, Interior View of Thames Tunnel, 1855.

34) Robert Howlett, Photograph of Isabard Kingdom Brunel, 1857.

35) John Martin, Pandemonium, 1841, oil on canvas, 123 x 184 cm, Private collection.

36) J.M.W. Turner, Snowstorm: Hannibal Crossing the Alps, 1812, oil on canvas, 145 x 236.5 Tate, London.

37) J.M.W. Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying- Typhoon Coming On, 1839, oil on canvas, 90.8 × 122.6 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

38) Francis Danby, An Attempt to Illustrate the Opening of the Sixth Seal, 1828, oil on canvas, 73 x 101 5/8, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

39) Francis Danby, Scene from the Apocalypse, c. 1829, oil on canvas, 61 x 77 cm, Private collection.

40) William Blake, “And the Angel Which I Saw Lifted Up His Hands To Heaven,” about 1805, pen & w/c over pencil, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

41) J.M.W. Turner, The Angel Standing in the Sun, 1846, oil on canvas, 78.7 x 78.7 cm, Tate, London.

42) J.M.W. Turner, Light and Colour, Goethe’s Theory, The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, 1843, oil on canvas, 78.5 x 78.5 cm, Tate, London.

Turner, Martin and the Apocalyptic Sublime (8)

Turner’s Vortex Vision & the Apocalyptic Sublime

Turner’s engagement with the sublime was more complex than Martin’s, largely because he drew on a variety of influences and sources to create his apocalyptic works. From classical history Turner took accounts of Hannibal’s trek across the Alps, but imbued it with a sense of imminent catastrophe conveyed by the whirling vortex of the composition as well as the colour black blotting out the sky. And Turner yoked his apocalyptic colour paintings to events in his own society with such paintings as Slavers Throwing the Dead Overboard, as did Danby with his allusion to slavery in his Sixth Seal painted for Beckford who was also Turner’s patron for a time.[1] What Jack Lindsay calls the “vortex vision” adumbrated in Hannibal and other vertiginous works becomes intensified and transposed to the realm of colour theory in the 1840s.[2] Turner also studied the ideas of Goethe through Goethe’s Theory of Colour (Zen Farbenlehre) available through an English translation by his friend Charles Eastlake in 1840. This resulted in Turner’s Light and Colour, a pendant to another canvas called Shade and Darkness. Light and Colour (above) put into practice through its technique Goethe’s claim that different colours of the spectrum were associated with varying emotions, though Turner firmly rejected Goethe’s anti-Newtonian views. Despite this painting dwelling on the morning after the Biblical Deluge, it has not been read as “a celebration of God’s salvation but a sceptical comment on it.” The “prismatic refractions of colour” are seen by one commentator as a subversion of the rainbow which is a symbol of God’s promise. As Vaughan states, Goethe saw the power of light as benevolent, but Turner saw it as indifferent, unsurprising for the man who wrote The Fallacies of Hope.[3]

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[1] Francis Danby 1793-1861, Tate and Bristol, 1988, no. 26. Anti- slavery campaigners regularly used apocalyptic imagery.

[2] Jack Lindsay, Turner: His Life and Work, (Granada, 1966), 266.

[3] William Vaughan, Romanticism and Art, (Thames and Hudson, 1978, 1994), 171.

Turner, Martin and the Apocalyptic Sublime (7)

John Martin, Milton & and the Industrial Revolution

For the poet Robert Southey, one of the wonders of the British Industrial Age, the Caledonian Canal, was strongly reminiscent of the scenes in John Martin’s pictures of both coalmines and Satan’s Hell in Paradise Lost. And in fact sometimes there is very little difference between Martin’s painting of engineering works and the fires of Hell since, to use Klingender’s words “John Martin gave Hell the imagery of industry” while “contemporary illustrators gave industry the image of Hell.”[1] Inspired by the anti-Newtonian Blake, Martin smelted the ore of Milton’s imagery into the pictorial language of the Industrial Revolution. So, “a bridge of length prodigious” built by Sin and Death in Paradise Lost was turned into a causeway within a tunnel, no accident as Brunel was driving the Thames Tunnel at that very time. The public were first admitted to it on 27^th February 1827, the year that Martin’s Paradise Lost was published, and this might explain why Martin exchanged Milton’s structure for a contemporary one.[2] Such famous engineering achievements as the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the Menai Bridge in their early as well as final stages may owe something to Martin’s designs. As an apocalyptic painter with an engineering bent, Martin was rather spoilt for choice; he could pick from the infernal architecture of Hell’s builder Mulciber whose crew built the Palace of Pandemonium in “Paradise Lost”; or he could take inspiration from the large institutions of the Liverpool and Manchester Railways whose station facades appear in such overwrought inventions as Belshazzar’s Feast, or The Great Day of his Wrath (above), which according to Martin’s son was inspired by a journey through the Black Country in the dead of night as well as remembrance of a passage in the Book of Revelations.[3]

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[1] Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, 109. Recently, in his Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2013) the cultural historian Jonathan Crary suggestively made the link between Wright’s depiction of Arkwright’s cotton mill and capitalism’s 24/7 society.

[2] “Paradise Lost,” Book X; Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, 106.

[3] Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, 116: “The glow of the furnaces, the red blaze of light, together with the liquid fire, seemed to his mind truly sublime and awful.”

Turner, Martin and the Apocalyptic Sublime (6)

Dark Satanic Mills: The Return of the Sublime in the Age of Capitalist Endeavour.

According to Klingender, the sense of despair at the rise of political economy and divorce of art from science caused painters to turn back to the eighteenth-century to reclaim the sublime. Then as now, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Frankenstein conceived at the Villa Diodati might have suggested the dangers of unleashing forces beyond the control of humans on the world; but for painters there was a ready-made symbol of the “scientific forces in society”- Milton’s Satan.[1] Added to this was an interest in the ruins of the ancient East, particularly Nineveh and Babylon which the painter John Martin explicitly connected with the “contemplation of the grand and the marvellous,” i.e. the sublime. Writing on his Fall of Nineveh exhibited in 1827, Martin observed “Seen through the mist of age, the great becomes gigantic, the wonderful flows into the sublime.”[2] Interestingly, this preoccupation with ancient Eastern civilization crossed over to the language of architecture and engineering during the Industrial Revolution. Use of oriental words and terms infiltrate descriptions of modern factories, bridges and engineering as in writers like Sir Walter Scott who drew parallels between the energy of James Watt in an introductory epistle to his novel The Monastery, and “Gouls and Afrits [Mohammedan devils] of the Eastern stories.”[3] And certain monuments of the Industrial Revolution like the Liverpool terminus of the Liverpool and Manchester Railways had Moorish designs, thus certifying the link between architects and archaeologists in the romantic period.[4] But it is the Christian Hell filtered through Milton’s sonorous poem that influences both written and painted descriptions of the infernal regions which are easily convertible into critiques of the monuments of capitalism as in Joseph Wright’s Arkwright’s Cotton Mill (above) which shows the lighted windows of an all-night cotton mill, inviting radicals to make the connection between the artificial light inside needed to keep the wheels of industry turning and the fires stoked by Satan in the infernal regions. This was to be most famously expressed in Blake’s “dark satanic mills,” and his comparison of the “turning wheels of heaven” to the “mills of industry” in his poem “Milton.”[5] Here, the mills have cosmic significance since they might also denote the mechanism of the Newtonian universe which provides the momentum for the planets to move in their courses, and by extension the economic system to continue on earth until the end of the world.

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[1] Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, 104.

[2] Cited in Ibid, 105.

[3] The appearance of this word in early 19^th century literature may owe something to Beckford’s oriental fantasy Vathek (1786) which uses the aesthetic of the sublime to conjure up impressions of vast buildings and the hubris of their architects. Beckford was also a patron of Turner and Danby.

[4] Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, 108.

[5] “And of the Wheels of Heaven. To turn the Mills day & night.”

Turner, Martin and the Apocalyptic Sublime (5)

 

Of Pyramids & Brick Kilns: The Industrial Sublime.

After his Tenth Plague of Egypt, Turner did one more- the Fifth Plague which he also included in his Liber Studiorum, a sort of boiled down compendium of his core works and ideas in drawings and etchings. Commenting on the Fifth Plague in the Liber Studiorum, John Ruskin expressed his displeasure at what Paley calls a possible “presentiment of modernity.” For Ruskin, the pyramids looked like “brick kilns” and the fire running along the ground resembled “the burning of manure.”[1] What Ruskin probably discerned is a link between scenes of apocalypse and the industrial revolution. One facet of the apocalyptic sublime that was overlooked in the early phase of romantic studies was the effect of the industrial revolution on apocalyptic sublimity. Paley understandably confines himself predominantly to history painting and landscape, the two main genres that tend to incorporate the concept of the sublime in visual art. But what of attempts to represent the “dark satanic mills,” Blake’s shorthand for the hellish nature of factories, mills, and other manifestations of industry that blighted people’s lives in the nineteenth-century? Fortunately, this omission was addressed in a direct way by the German art historian Francis D Klingender who combined the knowledge of an art historian with the specialist skills of a sociological and economic historian aware of issues like population growth and economic trends.[2] Klingender sought out imagery of industrial centres of power like Coalbrookdale and Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and compared the way different artists like Cotman, Martin and Wright drew and painted factories, bridges and other symbols of the industrial revolution. Klingender also delved into the causes behind the Industrial Revolution and the symptoms that characterised its malaise. After the tumult of the French Revolution and its aftermath, Europe succeeded to an “Age of Despair” with expressions of discontent even present in the drawings of a member of the comfortable, provincial middle-class like George Walker who drew factory children and coal miners in ragged clothes next to the machinery of the age (above) thus suggesting the deleterious effects of the industrial revolution on the working populace.[3] Despite the arguments of the father of political economy Adam Smith that the meanest individual in commercial society was better provided for in a “civilized” country than a “savage,” discontent grew and manifested itself in frame-breaking and repressive responses from the government. Nor were the romantic poets convinced by Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population that “misery and vice would always be the lot of mankind.”[4] Poets violently rejected this pessimistic judgement: Shelley condemned the “population principle” while Byron, Blake and Wordsworth each scorned the supplanting of art and humanism by political economy and science in their own way.[5]

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[1] Ruskin, Modern Painters Vol III, cited in Paley, Apocalyptic Sublime, 105.

[2] Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, (Paladin, 1947).

[3] Ibid, 96-97.

[4] Ibid, 99.

[5] Blake, “The Four Zoas”- “Compel the poor to live on a crust of bread through soft mild arts.” Byron’s attacks on Malthus in “Don Juan,” “Thou shalt not marry- unless well.” Wordsworth’s sorrowful meditation of the effects of industry on the rural countryside where even the “short holiday of childhood” seems to have been taken from the workers in “The Excursion” and other poems.

Turner, Martin and the Apocalyptic Sublime (4)

Manfred in the Mountains: The Byronic Sublime.

In 1816 with his reputation in tatters, separated from his wife, rumours of an affair with his half-sister Augusta, and besieged by bailiffs, Lord Byron sold his library and left England for ever with his valet and his companion Dr Polidori who was to provide a written account of the journey for the poet’s publisher John Murray. At the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Byron and Polidori met up with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his lover Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Mary Jane Clairmont, step daughter of William Godwin. Out of this meeting of minds, the Gothic shocker Frankenstein and Dr Polidori’s story “The Vampyre” would emerge, and Byron would also meet Matthew Lewis, the author of a lesser-known gothic classic-The Monk, which the poet had unforgettably described in 1813 as “might have been written by Tiberius at Caprea…the philtered ideas of a jaded voluptuary.” Soon Byron tired of all this talk of the supernatural and sought out nature itself in the company of his friend Hobhouse who had arrived from England, Polidori having worn out his welcome. Byron kept an “Alpine Journal” (a sort of parallel text to his poetic drama “Manfred” painted by John Martin (above) which deals with supernatural exploits in an Alpine setting) of these wanderings which is fascinating, not only for the descriptions of natural beauty, but also for insights into the poet’s mind which might be considered instances of how terror and beauty operate upon the mind in the presence of nature. In addition to the picturesque details Byron imparts such as peasant women rowing boats upon glassy Swiss lakes or the tinkling of cow bells through the misty dawn, the poet also gives us descriptions of the natural scenery which are tinged with feelings of melancholy and loss. As Byron’s biographer Peter Quennell points out, the poet’s “sense of beauty was instinct with a sense of terror.”[1] Thus musing on a lonely mountain torrent leaping from a rock, with the aid of natural phenomena, Byron conjures up the imagery of the old familiar Death the pale rider; the sight conveys “the tail of a white horse streaming in the wind, such as it might be conceived would be that of the pale horse on which Death is mounted in the Apocalypse…Neither mist nor water.”[2] The poet bleakly likened “whole woods of withered pines, all withered; trunks stripped and barkless, branches lifeless” to himself and his family. His half-sister Augusta Leigh back in England would learn from a postscript to Byron’s “Alpine Journal” that “neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud” had allowed him “to lose [his own] wretched identity.”[3] As Quennell says, Byron’s descriptions of natural wonders should be distinguished from Gray and Walpole’s letters which either (in the case of the former) turn the alps into a gigantic picture gallery, or (in the case of the second) anticipate something of the spirit of Wordsworth’s Prelude with the association of “religion and poetry” in nature. Eighty years before Byron emotionally reacted to nature, Walpole and Gray had the “romantic point of view [which] certainly preceded the Romantic Movement”[4] which in art is captured in the views of cataracts, avalanches, and mountains in the Alps by de Loutherbourg, Martin, Turner, Danby and other painters.[5]

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[1] Peter Quennel, Byron in Italy, (Collins, 1941), 50.

[2] Byron, “Alpine Journal,” Sep 23^rd, 1816.

[3] Ibid, Sep, 28^th-29^th.

[4] Quennell, Byron in Italy, 49.

[5] Francis Danby 1793-1861, Tate and Bristol, 1988, Danby’s dark (in all senses) The Precipice was sold in 1894 as “Death of an Alpine Hunter,” though it’s thought to allude to an accident on Helvellyn, no. 25.

Turner, Martin and the Apocalyptic Sublime (3)

After the Deluge.

Apart from animals out in the wilds, the best way of representing the power of the sublime in nature was to depict some natural disaster like a tempest or a flood. Noah’s biblical flood was a favourite with romantic painters, and by far the exemplar for romantic, apocalyptic painters was Nicolas Poussin’s The Deluge which with its sense of hopelessness in the face of relentless nature and divine vengeance was hugely influential on later generations of artists and critics. The author of the gothic extravaganza, The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole first saw Poussin’s Deluge in the Louvre in 1774 and was warmly enthusiastic, urging others to come and see it. Painters like Barry, Fuseli, and Constable were all drawn to it, all paying homage to the picture with Constable in a lecture of 1833 saying that there was no “greater proof of the effective power of landscape than [that] this portentous event should have been told by landscape alone, the figures being few and entirely subordinate.”[1] For some painters and critics, the sublime qualities of the picture were linked with its colouration, the strange speckled black and white which spreads across the picture contributing to its unique look. John Opie, Barry’s successor at the R.A. spoke of a “sombre grey” which contributed to the feeling of nature on the verge of annihilation, observations which match Burke’s discussion of “Colour considered as productive of the Sublime.” Visiting the Louvre in 1802, out of 19 Poussins, it was the Deluge that really arrested Turner, though he retained an ambivalent attitude towards Poussin’s gloomy masterpiece deeming the picture “unworthy of the mind of Poussin,” but conceding that the “colour is sublime.”[2] It is in this year that Turner painted his first apocalyptic canvas The Tenth Plague of Egypt, largely influenced by Richard Wilson’s Destruction of the Children of Niobe and the landscapes of Poussin. Though a staunch admirer of Poussin, Turner perceived deficiencies in Poussin’s Deluge, and therefore attempted a larger version of his own which failed spectacularly to live up to the gravity and grandeur of the original, which was conceived in a different spirit to the romantic age. The black/white pattern was, possibly meant to convey the complex theological ideas of clerics Poussin knew in Rome in his final years, not the embittered and bleak personality of a man close to death. Turner’s Deluge of 1805 (above) however is very much of its time, conceived with the idea of the romantic sublime in mind; humanity huddles in the foreground while figures in the middle ground seem powerless against the unrelenting forces of nature. Though it was admired, it was by no means an unqualified success.[3]

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[1] C.R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, quoted in Paley Apocalyptic Sublime, 9.

[2] The two pictures were shown side by side in the Turner and the Masters exhibition in London at the Tate (2009-10), nos 29 & 30.

[3] In the words of the curators, “Turner presents water, matter, bodies and sky as one unbroken, tumultuous continuum. Lit by the sinister red glow of the setting sun (as if in mute riposte to its ‘sick and wan’ counterpart in the Poussin) the scene was praised by contemporary critics as a powerful image of apocalyptic chaos and destruction.”

Turner, Martin and the Apocalyptic Sublime (2)

Ride a Pale Horse.

“When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, “Come.” I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth.” Revelations, 6:8.

The terrifying sight of Death represented by a crowned skeleton astride a ferocious white charger which tramples over everything and everybody originates in the Book of Revelations, the last Book of the New Testament. Death is the last of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who has been interpreted in a variety of ways: he could represent either Christ himself or the personification of Evil. Mortimer’s main source would have been Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving of the Four Horsemen, and possibly an etching by the seventeenth-century etcher, Stefano della Bella. To Paley, the sight of this dreadful apparition perfectly realizes the concept of the Burkean “sublime of terror” which would be used by a number of artists for different reasons. For example, the American painter Benjamin West would treat the subject as a huge battle scene with nods to Michelangelo and Rubens (above); whilist J.M.W. Turner in an unfinished, abstract oil in the Tate is thought to have used the subject to comment on the death of his father. Horses themselves would become part of the imagery of the sublime in nature with such subjects as Delacroix’s Horse struck by Lightning which was inspired by George Stubbs’s fearsome evocation of nature “red in tooth and claw,” A Lion Attacking a Horse.

Turner, Martin and the Apocalyptic Sublime. (1)

Painting the Apocalypse

For the uninitiated, the word apocalypse- apokalypsis- means revelation. In the words of the scholar of literary romanticism, M.H. Abrams, apocalypse is “a prophetic vision, set forth in arcane and elaborate symbols, of the imminent events which will bring an abrupt end to the present world order and replace it by a new and perfected condition of man and his milieu.”[1] Apocalypse is predominantly concerned with eschatology, i.e. the judgement of the divine in “the end of days” when a set of horrible disasters and violent events are visited upon the world followed by the appearance of a “Messianic redeemer” who ushers in a new realm and stops time. To many painters from the renaissance onwards, the imagery of the Book of Revelations furnished many ideas for pictures of fantastic beasts, events and symbols. In the romantic period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, images from Revelations became combined with Edmund Burke’s ideas on the sublime set out in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. According to Morton D. Paley, it was a drawing by John Hamilton Mortimer of Death on a Pale Horse shown at the R.A. in 1775 which united this iconography of revelation with Burke’s notions of the sublime which introduced what he called the “apocalyptic sublime” a “mode that subsequently effloresced during the period of the French Revolution.”[2] According to Paley, this convention is to be found in the following artists: Benjamin West, P.J. Loutherbourg, William Blake, J.M.W. Turner, John Martin, Samuel Colman and Francis Danby.[3]

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[1] M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, (Norton, 1971), 38

[2] Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime, (Yale, 1986), 1.

[3] Ibid.