Dali House

With great difficulty I gained my feet, and looking dizzily around was, at first, struck with the idea of our being among breakers; so terrific, beyond the wildest imagination, was the whirlpool of mountainous and foaming ocean within which we were engulfed … Amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering, oh God! and — going down.
— Edgar Allan Poe, from “MS found in a Bottle”. (Read about his actual demise in Dorseyland.)

“Explore the world’s oceans — shipwrecks galore!” says ShipwreckCentral.com, and Wikipedia records the details of hundreds of them, anywhere there’s water this side of your Jacuzzi. How many? Three million, reckons the United Nations.

That’s a lot of journeys interruptus, many pilgrimages aborted, myriad dreams denied entry by the bouncers of the bounding main. Noah barely made it, having blown a kiss to the sinners left behind on the boarding ramp, “those doomed antediluvians left to perish”, as Julian Barnes put it in “A History of the World in 10½ Chapters”.

A couple of chapters along, Barnes fretted over the survivors aboard Theodore Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” (crucial Dali House post here) — and what they represented. “We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.”

Ivan Aivazovsky’s “The Shipwreck”, from 1871, and here a detail from his earlier “Moonlit Seascape With Shipwreck”.

Noah has been painted since, well, biblical times, but the very real possibility of shipwrecks seemed to particularly haunt French and British (and Russian) artists across the bridge of the 18th and 19th centuries, probably because man’s position in the universal hierarchy had been diminished by scientific discoveries, and as a result of the emerging spiritual awareness that he was perhaps not God’s pet project after all. Nature’s awesome power, fresh evidence of which turned up in every new place he explored, became a metaphor for his new sense of helplessness.

Géricault’s hero-less raft, tossed upon the public consciousness in 1819 amid horrific newspaper accounts of the catastrophe it depicted, was merely the most celebrated of the shipwreck paintings. JMW Turner, 16 years his senior, offered a much more frenzied scene, “The Shipwreck”, in 1805, above, and, living by the sea, couldn’t let the subject go. In 1810 he painted “The Wreck of a Transport Ship”, in 1823 — by which time Géricault was already dying of tuberculosis — “The Storm (Shipwreck)”, in 1825 “Shipwreck off Hastings” and in 1835 “Fire at Sea”, sometimes referred to as “Disaster at Sea”.

His creativity always in danger of subsiding in a doom of its own making, Turner nevertheless managed to live far longer than most of his species in those wretched times. See Dali House’s Turner biography.

The 1823 picture reproduced above, now at the British Museum in London, came three years after Géricault’s “Raft” was shown at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, where Turner joined the 40,000-strong throng who came to see what all the fuss in France was about. JMW may well have been impressed by the younger artist’s forceful composition as well as its subject matter. At one point Turner was crossing the sea himself when a gale blew up and he ventured on deck, sketch pad in hand. Warned off by the crew, he told them to lash him to a mast so he could watch the fury in relative safety.

And so he did, for four hours, spinning in the vortex of the wind, and that’s how he depicted all the elements of his hurricanes. What had to be aligned on the canvas was aligned in spirals askew, and with sharp diagonal elements almost forcing the viewer to lean to one side as if on a sloping deck.

The ship staggered under a thunderous shock
That shook us asunder, as if she had struck and crashed on a rock;
For the huge sea smote every soul from the decks of The Falcon but one;
All of them, all but the man that was lash’d to the helm had gone.
— Alfred Lord Tennyson, from “The Wreck”. See the rest.