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”.

In “Fire at Sea”, which London’s Tate Gallery owns, Turner found something of the social conscience that Géricault had expressed, the wreck of a shipload of women convicts on their way to Australia, more than 100 souls lost thanks to official arrogance. Its storm-maddened master refused the aid of a passing French vessel.

Here is Turner’s “The Wreck of a Transport Ship”, from about 1810. Another convict ship, though the prisoners were more likely military this time, with fishing boats struggling to try and hedge the loss of life. This image is from the website of New Zealand’s Auckland Art Gallery, but it admits it may have inadvertently bought a copy of the original now at Lisbon’s Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.

And Turner’s “Shipwreck off Hastings”, from about 1825, at the National Gallery of Ireland.

Clarkson Frederick Stanfield (1793-1867) wasn’t the brave volunteer that Turner was when it came to the sea. He was pressed into service with the Royal Navy in 1808, just 15 years old, but he must have come to like the briny life. Poor health got him discharged after six years, and then he turned around and got on another boat and sailed to China, returning with a stack of sketches that won him a scene-painter’s job at a London theatre. Shown here is a detail from his “Wreck of the Avenger“, at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery.

September 30, 1659. I, poor miserable Robinson Crusoe, being shipwrecked during a dreadful storm in the offing, came on shore on this dismal, unfortunate island, which I called “The Island of Despair”; all the rest of the ship’s company being drowned, and myself almost dead.
— Daniel Defoe, putting it better than his inspiration could. Alexander Selkirk’s real-life adventure came about because of his fear of a shipwreck. The privateer’s galleon Cinque Ports was too shaky for him, and he was granted permission to be put ashore, anywhere, please. His home for the next four years was an uninhabited Juan Fernández island well off the coast of Chile. Crusoe stayed lost for 28 years.

This is “Shipwreck” by Claude Joseph Vernet, from 1759, at the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, with a detail below. Vernet (1714-89) packed his kit at age 14, said so long to his father, a decorative painter, and headed for Rome. Between Marseilles and the Eternal City, though, the undulating waters convinced him that he belonged with the tide, and he signed up for lessons with the marine painter Bernardino Fergioni.

Vernet got so good at ships and storms that the King of France called him home in 1753 to paint the country’s seaports. The court set him up with rooms in the Louvre, and that’s where he died 46 years later.

The ship hangs hovering on the verge of death,
Hell yawns, rocks rise, and breakers roar beneath!
— From “The Shipwreck” (1762), by William Falconer. At age 19 the Scottish poet had been one of only three survivors of a trading ship that sank in the Mediterranean. He wrote this piece age 30 and won the patronage of the Duke of York, who promptly put him back on a boat, as purser on various warships. In 1769, having just published “The Universal Marine Dictionary”, Falconer went down on the frigate Aurora off the Cape of Good Hope.

The annihilation that waves can bring is deafeningly captured in “Storm with a Shipwreck” from 1835, in which Paris-born Eugène Isabey (1803-86) evidently features a corpse among the remnants of the beached vessel, though I can’t make it out from this image. Isabey, who would become a court painter to Louis-Philippe, had dipped his brushes in the English Channel and the Mediterranean.

Below is his wonderfully luminescent “Hurricane before Saint Malo”, from 1860, a frantic retreat from the fury, with the Church watching dubiously from an ostensibly safe distance.

A raging wave, mountain-like, came rolling astern of us, and plainly bade us expect the coup de grace. It took us with such a fury, that it overset the boat at once; and separating us as well from the boat as from one another, gave us no time to say, “O God!” for we were all swallowed up in a moment.

Nothing can describe the confusion of thought which I felt when I sank into the water; for though I swam very well, yet I could not deliver myself from the waves … I saw the sea come after me as high as a great hill, and as furious as an enemy, which I had no means or strength to contend with.
— More from “Robinson Crusoe”. A century and a half later Robert Louis Stevenson wrote evocatively of the waves too, though ships going down were only allusory. Even Dr Jekyll fretted over “the shipwreck of my reason”.

As am I. This post will take a break for a couple of days while I wring out my deck shoes.

Added mid-June 2008: “Storm with a Shipwreck and Burning Village” by the Flemish Baroque painter Bonaventura Peeters (1614-52), for whom zeekens (small seascapes) were a speciality, and dying vessels a common theme. This one was on auction at Sotheby’s Milan in May, expected to bring up to 15,000 euros. Let Artcyclopedia show you many more examples of Peeters’ work.