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]
[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.”
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