Portent Sublimity

Taylor Williams
15 March 2005
Humanities 382
Dr. Hughes

Portent Sublimity

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in 1775 to a Covent Garden barber, a prodigy. Over the next seventy-six years of his life Turner would not only establish himself as a forerunner in British painting, but also revolutionize and challenge the conventional presuppositions people possessed about art in general. He developed an original style which grew from established landscape painting, drew largely from ideals of romanticism and sublimity, and infused with an insatiable drive to express the aura of environments he painted rather than merely their physical manifestations. That drive to present more than basic topographical representations is what fueled the fire in Turner which created an enigma out of a mere man.
As Turner grew as an artist his paintings began to grow more and more experimental in nature. Grove Art attributes this, partially, to an “exploration of effects of light in the pursuit of new demonstrations of sublimity.”1 In fact, much of Turner’s later work can be viewed as an ever-expanding study in presentations of the sublime, specifically in landscape painting. Edmund Burke, an eighteenth century British statesman and political philosopher, in his 1775 Philosophical enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, goes through great pains to convey some base understanding of what it takes to conjure feelings of the sublime, for indeed sublimity, in its purest form, is something to be felt at the core of a person’s very being rather than simply observed among the senses. Burke expounds “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say whatever is in any sort terrible… is a source of the sublime.” It is important to draw a distinction here between thinking about the terrible as the sublime and as a source of the sublime. Though Burke does not go through great trouble to clarify this distinction, his careful wording and later exploration into the manifestations of the sublime do point to this understanding. As Burke begins to explain what it is that actually summons these ghosts of the sublime, he lights on a number of elements, which can be viewed as terrible, but in and of themselves have an almost divine element. These elements include obscurity, vastness, the infinite, privation, and majesty. They are calculated to provide such a sense of extremity that they approach, or envelop, concepts which the fallible human mind cannot entirely grasp. Burke goes so far as to describe this concept of infinity as the “truest test of the sublime.”2 This statement is where Burke most clearly separates the distance between terror as the sublime and terror as a source of the sublime, going so far as to essentially confirm the connotations of divinity in relation to sublimity. What makes the concept of the sublime seem so terrible is its overriding manifestation in elements which the human mind cannot entirely grasp, such as the infinite. Driven by the ingrained desire for understanding, when humans come across things which, by definition, cannot be understood, they respond either with terror, or awe. Burke devotes most of his time to explaining the darker, more terrible, manifestations of the sublime, however, the awesome must equally be accepted. As Turner became increasingly concerned with depictions of the sublime in his later paintings, he utilized both avenues in understanding the concept.

In 1842, Turner exhibited a set of paintings which quite clearly demonstrate this duplicitous nature of the sublime. Through the painting Snow Storm – Steam-boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, Turner presents a fairly typical, Burkian impression of the sublime as a terrible, astonishment-inducing element. Yet in the same year, he exhibited the pair War, The Exile and the Rock Limpet and Peace, Burial at Sea, which front a much more subdued, divine understanding which is equally, if not more, demonstrative of sublimity. Though these three paintings are not the only paintings exhibited in 1842, and are certainly not the only, nor most extreme, exemplifications of the sublime Turner produced, taken in conjunction with one another, they present a breadth and range in manifestations of sublimity that clearly demonstrate Turner’s mastery of the concept’s delicate nuances.

Exhibited to heavy criticism, Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth is a painting of almost exacting compliance to Burke’s arguments of the sublime. The basic spiral composition of the piece works effectively to move the eye in an almost unceasing circle adding to the overall sense of vastness in the piece. Though the spiral is the basic element of the piece’s composition, the overriding aspect of its presentation rests on its unresolved nature, or obscurity. That decision to leave it largely unresolved is what attracted the largest amount of criticism. In response to the extreme sense of fluidity of the painting, along with Turner’s decisions for its colorization, one critic called the piece “soapsuds and whitewash.” The criticism actually served as the fuel for Ruskin to turn around with a spirited response of Turner’s work, a response that eventually evolved into five volumes entitled Modern Painters. Turner himself seems to have responded more virulently to the statement that someone made saying they understood what he was getting at. “I did not paint it to be understood,” Turner said, “but I wished to show what such a scene was like.” He followed that statement with a declaration that he had asked the sailors to tie him to the mast while the storm raged so that if he survived he might paint it. That declaration has gone down in history as the pinnacle of Turner’s enigmatic statements. Such a spirited defense of the painting as a presentation of a feeling rather than an attempt to convey understanding speaks well to a Burkian view of sublimity. The painting is calculated to inspire astonishment, fear, and terror. The darkness of its preeminent subjects, contrasting with the lightness of the raging storm creates the lines which draw the eye around and in, also fits very closely with Burke’s presentation of sublimity. The element of this painting which works most clearly to conjure feelings of the terrible and astonishment is the overt sense of privation which pervades the steamboat. By establishing the boat in such a vast plane, alone, with no hope sight, just a little off center, Turner cements the almost hopeless situation the boat is in while conjuring feelings of unbalance within the viewer, whose mind unconsciously, and unsuccessfully, tries to center to boat in the painting. All of these elements come together in Snowstorm to establish the sublime as a force of terror, and do so astonishingly well.

As an enduring set, also completely imbued with the sublime, War – The Exile and the Rock Limpet and Peace Burial at Sea exist almost in direct contradiction to the concept of sublimity presented in Snowstorm. In both War and Peace, Turner uses a similar obscurity to the one in the previous painting. The difference being that in the pair of paintings, the obscurity serves to surround everything with a majestic mist rather than feelings of hopelessness. Once more, contrast serves to pull the eye to the focal point. In Peace – Burial at Sea, an extremely divine white vertical light inexplicably highlights a coffin being lowered off the side of the ship, which is a mass completely devoid of colour. In fact, when criticized about the blackness of the sails Turner indignantly responded “I only wish I had any colour to make them blacker.” In War, the contrast of Napoleon’s form against the lightest part of the sky, just next to the setting sun, also pulls the eye to the defunct would-be emperor, but not in a terrible way. Both paintings use a receding horizon, which places action on an extremely vast plane. Most of the same elements that are used to present sublimity as terrible in Snowstorm, also exist in War and Peace to completely different ends. Peace is imbued with stillness, focused on the divine light in the centre of the piece. Rather than being terrible, Peace utilizes the elements of the sublime to create majesty bordering on divinity. Even though War possesses a much more bloodied subject with Napoleon, Turner approaches that blood with the redness of the sunset, and in fact makes it almost beautiful while capturing the feeling that its time is over. The main element in the pair of paintings are their overt placidity, which gives the viewer a sense of majesty and awe, and a feeling of divine control as opposed to uncontrollable terror. While sublimity is every bit as present in the pair as it is in Snowstorm, the divine elements give the smaller paintings a depth, and multiplicity of layers of understanding, which Snowstorm could never achieve, thereby creating the argument for the divine sublime’s superiority to the terrible sublime.

Further down the road, the general understanding of the sublime actually did shift to indulge growing support for a more divine concept of sublimity. It would seem, then, that Turner, at least in so much as his more controversial works are concerned, was a man ahead of his time, and an oracle of things to come. This argument is often applied to the impressionistic style he evolved, or some would say devolved, into over his career as an artist, as a harbinger of the impressionist movement with would gain momentum in France shortly after his death. Whatever opposing views might be held about the value of Turner’s work, it must be accepted that he forever impacted not only the face of British art, but that of the entire world.

Works cited:

1: Unknown Author: ‘Turner, J(oseph) M(allord) W(illiam)’, Grove Art Online, (Oxford University Press, Accessed 11, March 2005) http://www.groveart.com

2: "Burke, Edmund." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2005. Encyclopædia Britannica Online 12 Mar. 2005 .

3: Burke, Edmond: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757

4: Reynolds, Graham. Turner. Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1969.