Claude-Joseph Vernet, A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas

At the 1771 Paris Salon, the British officer and East India Company official Lord Clive (known as Clive of India) saw a pair of marine paintings by Vernet. He was so enchanted with them that he commissioned the artist to paint a similar pair, only larger, for him. When Vernet quoted 12000 livres, Clive balked at the price. The paintings he eventually bought early in May 1773 were not those he had commissioned, but a smaller pair that had been commissioned on behalf of Stanislas Augustus, King of Poland, in June or July 1772 for 9,600 livres. According to the letter that Vernet wrote to Clive’s agent, the substitution was made because the King was slow to pay.

The painting originally known as ‘Calme’, which Vernet painted first, shows an imaginary harbour as fishermen return with their catch on a tranquil summer evening. The golden sun is at the centre of the painting, its light illuminating the undersides of the few clouds and reflecting off the surface ripples of the water. Light, shadow and atmosphere are the true subjects of Vernet’s painting, the figures in the foreground merely a foil to the beauty of the hazy meeting of light, air and water. The painting follows in the tradition of Claude’s Italianate seaport views such as A Seaport of 1664, and Seaport with the Embarkation of Saint Ursula of 1641.

The painting originally called ‘Tempête’ depicts a rocky shoreline buffeted by a violent sea storm. Two ships roll in the giant swell, sails tied down, or tattered by the turbulent winds and lashing rain. Bolts of lightning streak from the dark thunder clouds that cover the sun, but the lighthouse lamp is not lit. Huge waves crash over the shore, pouring like waterfalls back down from the cliffs. The remains of a ship lie shattered against the rocks in the lower right foreground. Figures carry salvaged goods up the beach, while an unconscious woman is laid out on a rock, her friends overwhelmed with despair. Further down the coast there is a break in the clouds and sunlight bathes the mountainous landscape. It appears that the devastating storm has arrived suddenly and without warning, leaving no time for the lighthouse lamp to be lit. Perhaps the distant sunlit landscape is to give us hope that the storm will soon abate.

Vernet intended his contrasting seascapes to affect our emotions and to leave us awed and inspired by the majestic power and beauty of nature. In this, he was exploring fashionable ideas expressed in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757; first French edition 1765) – a text that had a significant influence on the Romantic and Gothick movements in European art and literature. Burke proposed that beauty stimulates love and relaxes, while the sublime excites horror and creates tension. When we realise that the horror of the sublime in the arts is fictional, this causes the negative feelings to dissipate and creates a sense of pleasure.

These are two of Vernet’s greatest marine paintings and the type of work for which he was most famous in his day. They are the only great pair of marine views by him in a British public collection.