Dali House

From 1849, “The Shipwreck (The Wreck of the Hope)” by the Irish-born Francis Danby (1793-1861), whose career was built on Bible scenes and purer fantasies but triumphed with “Sunset at Sea, After a Storm”, sometimes referred to as “Shipwreck Against a Setting Sun”, in 1824, only to lose ground in a row with the Royal Academy after Constable topped him for the presidency by a single vote. Danby fled to the continent but returned to favour with “The Deluge” in 1840, and never again strayed far from the sea, though he fell well short of Turner’s popularity.

In “The Wreck of the Hope” Danby emphasises humanity’s helplessness in the face of monstrous nature, his ship all but demolished and the crew chaotically close to doom, a lifeboat capsized and nothing but a battery of rocks to offer meagre hope of salvation.

Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900), whose gripping scenes opened Part 1 of this post, also painted “The Ninth Wave” in 1850, above and detail below. More than half of his output was seascapes, beginning with views of all the coastal towns in his native Crimea and ultimately winning him a commission with the Russian Navy and a favoured place in the Turkish court.

As Wikipedia notes, he was the most prolific Russian painter of his time, with more than 6,000 works — and is believed to be the most forged Russian ever as well. The three paintings on these pages are all in private collections.

Down on the vale of Death, with dismal cries,
The fated victims shuddering roll their eyes
In wild despair; while yet another stroke
With deep convulsion, rends the solid oak:
Till like the mine, in whose infernal cell
The lurking demons of destruction dwell,
At length asunder torn, her frame divides;
And crashing spreads in ruin o’er the tides.
— More from Falconer’s “The Shipwreck”. Like him, Percy Bysse Shelley lived by the roaring waves and died by them.

William Adolphus Knell painted his “Shipwreck” in 1856 and showed his sons the way. If historians are confused today about whether he was born in 1802 or 1818, it’s probably because there were at least four well-known marine painters in the Knell family, all living the same London address, but unclearly related. The family tree was “at sea”, as it were.

As mentioned not too long ago at Dali House, Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was summoned by the sea from his landlubber’s life as a commercial illustrator. At age 41 he set sail and saw Europe, settling on England’s Northumberland coast and for two years sketching the same kind of fishing scenes he’d seen around Boston, where he was born.

Once in America again he chose to live in Maine and winter in Florida, Cuba and the Bahamas. Above is “After the Hurricane” from 1899, and below, “Wrecked Schooner” from 1908, believed to be his final watercolour, the crew’s death presaging his own. It’s at St Louis’ City Art Museum.

In a remarkable essay on VictorianWeb, which sparked this post, George P Landow writes engagingly about the violent ocean and its place in the arts. He points out in the process that William Wordsworth lost his brother John at sea in 1805, that Stephen Crane was on the shipwrecked Commodore in 1897, and that, in between, Henry David Thoreau set out to see the sea for himself — and got more than he bargained for.

As Landow writes: Arriving in Boston on his way to Cape Cod in October 1849, Thoreau “discovers that a severe storm has delayed the boat he had planned to take to Provincetown and that the same storm took 145 lives at Cohasset, which then became his destination. Passing the graveyard, he observes a large hole, like a cellar, being prepared for a mass burial; and arriving at the beach, Thoreau encounters the sea and its victims”:

I saw many marble feet and matted heads as the cloths were raised, and one livid, swollen and mangled body of a drowned girl, who probably had intended to go out to service in some American family, to which some rags still adhered … with wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, dead-lights … Sometimes there were two or more children, or a parent and child, in the same box.

In the autumn of 1860 the Illustrated London News trembled at the unprecedented loss of life in accidents at sea over the previous 12 months. Most of the tragedies were attributed to unusually heavy storms in October and November a year earlier. More than 1,600 lives had been lost among the 10,000 passengers aboard 1,416 wrecks, it reported. One in every 175 voyages by British ships had suffered some form of casualty, compared to one in 335 foreign vessels.

Provocative numbers, but clearly many people were willing or obliged to take the risk regardless. With all due respect to the drowned, wouldn’t an encounter with a mermaid have compensated for the risk? After all the rage of the oceans, we deserve to meet some girls!

Englishman Herbert James Draper (1863-1920) came up with quite a catch in “The Sea Maiden”, painted in 1894, which currently dries at the Royal Cornish Museum in Truro. Draper claimed to have researched the project by personally spending “hours in a boat with a fishing net floating in the water over a couple of spars” off Devon and the Scillies and then booking passage on a trawler to watch the nets hauled in, “a roughish sort of experience”. It was worth it: “The Sea Maiden” set him up for life.

Sea nymphs are nereids, some powerful, some lackadaisical, all compelled and compelling. There was Cabeiro on the isle of Lemnos; Calliste of Calliste Island; Capheira, who nursed Poseidon; Cymopoleia of the highest waves; the prophetic Eidothea; Oeolyca, the “Lone Wolf” of the storm surges; and Pallas, the warrior nymph who was Athena’s friend.

Fifteen years after “The Sea Maiden”, Draper painted “Ulysses and the Sirens”, below.

There have always been sirens and mermaids enchanting sailors with their songs, distracting them from their duty, usually with fatal consequences, and if they swam to their rescue forgetting their own strength and crushing them to death, or facilitating their drowning by carrying them underwater.

Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98) captured the sea nymphs’ forgetfulness about a man’s need for oxygen in the curiously charming “The Depths of the Sea” in 1887. The great promoter of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was steeped in Arthuriana and had a home life among the famous MacDonald sisters that was as dodgy as the mythic king’s.

Draper’s great rival in society and in art, and related to Burne-Jones by marriage, Sir Edward John Poynter (1836-1919) was already well known for his huge historical scenes from the ancient world and was president of the Royal Academy by the time he cast his net upon “The Cave of the Storm Nymphs” in 1903 (detail below). It’s in a private collection, wouldn’t you know it, but every poster shop in cyberspace has a copy if you need one.

The Assyrians and Babylonians knew the ocean nymphs long before the Greeks. Alexander the Great’s sister may have become one upon her death. Columbus said he’d seen them. The “Arabian Nights” had Djullanar the Sea-girl. British folklore has lying mermaids, gigantic ones and curative ones. They’re in the Caribbean, off the African coast, in Russian waters, in the South China Sea, and, most recently (1967!), in Canada’s Strait of Georgia.

There have been Celtic selkies, Brittany’s morgens, German nixies, Norwegian havfrau, the veen of Finland and the vedava of Eastern Europe.

A man for the Old Testament and the classics, Sir Frederic Leighton (1830-96) painted “The Fisherman and the Syren”, shown here, in his late 20s and “Actaea, the Nymph of the Shore” about a decade later, further endearing himself to his Royal Academy colleagues.

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And then there’s Mr Waterhouse, whose fetching effort is daily ogled by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, but Dali House has dallied with his fair creatures once before.

Hans Christian Andersen gave children a Little Mermaid to play with, but the rest of us can only be glad we have not been lured to our doom, and comiserate with TS Eliot:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.