‘Set or raised aloft, high up’; ‘Rising to a great height, lofty, towering’; ‘Exalted’; ‘Supreme’: by dictionary definition, ‘sublime’ signifies a state of elevation through which ascent towards physical or metaphorical heights brings about transcendence.1 ‘Go, fell the timber of yon’ lofty grove’, the poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) had the Greek author Homer say in The Odyssey, ‘And form a Raft, and build the rising ship, / Sublime to bear thee o’er the gloomy deep’.2 Yet, as these lines suggest, ‘sublime’ (etymologically perhaps sub limen, up to a high threshold) always carries with it – even if only as trace memory – that over which it climbs or floats: ‘the gloomy deep’.
Pope quickly turned to this alternative site or state of ‘sub’ to which sublimity is umbilically attached but from which it had to be distinguished if transcendent achievement, poetic or otherwise, was to remain clear in an increasingly competitive world. He therefore set about defining this realm which lay beneath the sublime’s aerial firmament, a realm which reaches down into the depths and which is characterised by both dazzling material riches and mysterious profundities: ‘The Sublime of Nature is the Sky, the Sun, Moon, Stars, &c. The Profound of Nature is Gold, Pearls, precious Stones, and the Treasures of the Deep, which are [as] inestimable as unknown.’ In Pope’s satirical account (his tongue was firmly in his cheek here), these depths are the imaginary province to which the second-rate artist seeking wealth and patronage aspires, the decidedly sub par counterpart to those exalted heights of poetic sublimity at which their more talented and judicious colleagues arrive. Mediocre writers and painters therefore practise (Pope argued) an ‘Art of Sinking’, a descent into that jarring mixture of obscure nonsense and trivial or gaudy allusions which nevertheless seemed to represent poetic depth to the pretentious. By ‘keeping under Water’, the artist could therefore achieve precisely that over which the sublime soared: ‘the Bottom’ of his art.3 This is a wholesale revision of the ancient Greek term ‘bathos’, whose original reference to ‘depth’ remains in the technical terms for deep-sea diving equipment, the ocean bed and its measurement yet whose rhetorical formulation by Pope – as a ‘ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace ... anticlimax’ – is now dominant.4 Seeking to consolidate an opposition between high and low, Pope’s ‘bathos’ is shot through with its divisive social implications, which find form in the fictive poetic examples – among them the lady who acts like a street hawker and the footman who speaks like a prince – with which he illustrates his account.5
By engaging with the implications of ‘beneath’, of the sub- in the sublime, this article sets out to challenge any sense of the sublime as necessarily already ascendant, as always and easily cut free from its murky remnant. In particular, this article will focus on the ways in which J.M.W. Turner set about suggesting, to an extent which is unprecedented in the visual representation of water, what it might be to be beneath – beneath the horizon, beneath the water and beneath paint. The broader implications of this ‘submarine’ state for the forms of subjectivity at stake in Turner’s work will be hinted at towards the end but, by way of instructive analogy, I want to begin with a metropolitan site which was all but given over in the early nineteenth century to the idea that paintings and people speak from the deep, in a process which seemed to conjure both the sublime and the subliminal.
Easter Amusements – The Greenwich Pensioners … (with biographical details on each) The Illustrated London News 13 April 1844, p.233
Easter Amusements – The Greenwich Pensioners … (with biographical details on each) The Illustrated London News 13 April 1844, p.233
© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
Fig.1
Easter Amusements – The Greenwich Pensioners … (with biographical details on each) The Illustrated London News 13 April 1844, p.233
© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
A living museum, Greenwich had become (within a few decades of the battle of Trafalgar) the ‘resting place’ of ‘national prowess on the ... ocean’, an entire pantheon to a now-past greatness whose human and cultural fragments were placed on conspicuous display in order that ‘a commercial world’ be reminded of its moral debts.6 For the architects of nineteenth-century Greenwich’s transformation, all members of London’s cultural élite, those debts were – it should be understood by the site’s visitors – owed to the political status quo, to the charismatic leadership naturally possessed by those of rank and to the heartfelt obedience of those who served under them. The latter could still be found in abundance at Greenwich, old sailors, the pensioned and policed veterans of naval warfare, who – when they were not to be found scattered around Greenwich Hospital like wreckage on the sea bed – were employed to serve as the mouthpieces for this sanctioned vision of the past (fig.1). As guides to the growing collection of portraits and seascapes hung in the nation’s ‘Naval Gallery’ (which covered the walls of the Painted Hall from 1824 onwards), the Pensioners’ attentive engagement with these art works was figured as an exemplary lesson in painting’s capacity to prompt and restore affective patriotism. As the journalist Henry Clarke put it in 1842:
Every blue-jacket [that is, every old sailor], may now ... reclaim from oblivion some anecdote of courage or of kindness. An attentive public, in listening to the unaffected strain, will learn to respect the knowledge displayed, and the generous effusions of a brave man’s heart ... From such observations a candid and judicious artist may learn how to improve his compositions: why some pictures ... fail to call forth the feelings of an unsophisticated public; whilst ... one of rude aspect, may kindle all the outward expression of deep-rooted sympathy.
The impact of such Pensioner soliloquies would therefore be perceived not only ‘in the improved taste ... and in the improved feelings’ of that ‘attentive public’ but also in the output of contemporary artists who, listening to the sailor’s ekphrastic recovery ‘from oblivion’ of past officer-class merit, might ‘learn how to improve his compositions’ so that they appealed to the better sentiments of plebeian audiences.7 Moreover, by inhabiting a public exhibition space aimed at the articulation of conservative ideals to an audience of increasingly – and, to some minds, worryingly – socially enfranchised urban day-trippers, painting was made to illustrate self-sacrifice in the name of a greater good. Only then, Clarke claimed, are ‘the arts of peace’made to put forth their best energies – to shed their lustre on the history of a nation’s bravest sons, and tempt the early germs of enthusiasm to rivalry with past greatness. This is the proper application of the art of painting.8
That medium appeared at Greenwich as a means of redressing the apparently diminished role of both élite example and popular heroism in a railway age, as a proactive presence capable of working its magic upon the political and moral sensibilities of its viewers decades, even centuries, after its own production.9 For Clarke (and he was merely echoed by the Naval Gallery’s other commentators), painting’s ‘proper application’ was to instantiate a past greatness that might thereby be raised up, resurfacing in the present to powerful (if reactionary) social and cultural effect.
This sense of painting’s ability to transcend the impact of change and the stark temporal difference wrought by modernity referenced the broader reconception of art’s powers which had been elaborated in aesthetic theory since the late eighteenth century. There, art had increasingly been deemed capable of challenging the distance not only between past and present but also between seeing and feeling.10 Furthermore, by the time that Clarke put pen to paper in the 1840s, the notion that both painters and their paintings might have such transformative effects on their viewers had come to be associated in particular with the works of one artist: Turner.
Joseph Mallord William Turner 'Fishermen at Sea' exhibited 1796
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Fishermen at Sea exhibited 1796
Oil paint on canvas
support: 914 x 1222 mm; frame: 1120 x 1425 x 105 mm
Purchased 1972
Tate T01585
T01585
Fig.2
Joseph Mallord William Turner
Fishermen at Sea exhibited 1796
In 1796, the year after the Naval Gallery had first been mooted, Fishermen at Sea (fig.2) appeared at the Royal Academy, the first oil painting to be exhibited by this artist, barely out of his teens. Hung (as was usual for lesser-known painters) in the Academy’s Ante Room, Fishermen at Sea shows Turner deploying his work’s relatively gloomy destination to his own ends by portraying the dazzling effects of searing moonlight as it emerges through a parting in the clouds to glow upon sea-water.11 As one reviewer noted, Turner had used significant artistic licence here to provide his scene with two pools of reflected moonlight rather than one; the overall effect was enough to draw his viewers in to gaze more closely upon his own public emergence and breakthrough as oil painter.12 Still almost unknown, Turner here produced a painting which – variously considered by exhibition critics to be the result of empirical observation or a more theoretical exercise in the laws of light – ‘has not its superior within the walls of the Academy’.13 It was not, one critic thought, an auspicious subject (‘Moon-lights are trite subjects’, he said) but Fishermen at Seaappeared to transcend the restrictions of literal meaning and cater immediately to its viewers’ capacity for aesthetic responsiveness. For exhibition critics, this was a pictur
‘Set or raised aloft, high up’; ‘Rising to a great height, lofty, towering’; ‘Exalted’; ‘Supreme’: by dictionary definition, ‘sublime’ signifies a state of elevation through which ascent towards physical or metaphorical heights brings about transcendence.1 ‘Go, fell the timber of yon’ lofty grove’, the poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) had the Greek author Homer say in The Odyssey, ‘And form a Raft, and build the rising ship, / Sublime to bear thee o’er the gloomy deep’.2 Yet, as these lines suggest, ‘sublime’ (etymologically perhaps sub limen, up to a high threshold) always carries with it – even if only as trace memory – that over which it climbs or floats: ‘the gloomy deep’.
Pope quickly turned to this alternative site or state of ‘sub’ to which sublimity is umbilically attached but from which it had to be distinguished if transcendent achievement, poetic or otherwise, was to remain clear in an increasingly competitive world. He therefore set about defining this realm which lay beneath the sublime’s aerial firmament, a realm which reaches down into the depths and which is characterised by both dazzling material riches and mysterious profundities: ‘The Sublime of Nature is the Sky, the Sun, Moon, Stars, &c. The Profound of Nature is Gold, Pearls, precious Stones, and the Treasures of the Deep, which are [as] inestimable as unknown.’ In Pope’s satirical account (his tongue was firmly in his cheek here), these depths are the imaginary province to which the second-rate artist seeking wealth and patronage aspires, the decidedly sub par counterpart to those exalted heights of poetic sublimity at which their more talented and judicious colleagues arrive. Mediocre writers and painters therefore practise (Pope argued) an ‘Art of Sinking’, a descent into that jarring mixture of obscure nonsense and trivial or gaudy allusions which nevertheless seemed to represent poetic depth to the pretentious. By ‘keeping under Water’, the artist could therefore achieve precisely that over which the sublime soared: ‘the Bottom’ of his art.3 This is a wholesale revision of the ancient Greek term ‘bathos’, whose original reference to ‘depth’ remains in the technical terms for deep-sea diving equipment, the ocean bed and its measurement yet whose rhetorical formulation by Pope – as a ‘ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace ... anticlimax’ – is now dominant.4 Seeking to consolidate an opposition between high and low, Pope’s ‘bathos’ is shot through with its divisive social implications, which find form in the fictive poetic examples – among them the lady who acts like a street hawker and the footman who speaks like a prince – with which he illustrates his account.5
By engaging with the implications of ‘beneath’, of the sub- in the sublime, this article sets out to challenge any sense of the sublime as necessarily already ascendant, as always and easily cut free from its murky remnant. In particular, this article will focus on the ways in which J.M.W. Turner set about suggesting, to an extent which is unprecedented in the visual representation of water, what it might be to be beneath – beneath the horizon, beneath the water and beneath paint. The broader implications of this ‘submarine’ state for the forms of subjectivity at stake in Turner’s work will be hinted at towards the end but, by way of instructive analogy, I want to begin with a metropolitan site which was all but given over in the early nineteenth century to the idea that paintings and people speak from the deep, in a process which seemed to conjure both the sublime and the subliminal.
Easter Amusements – The Greenwich Pensioners … (with biographical details on each) The Illustrated London News 13 April 1844, p.233
Easter Amusements – The Greenwich Pensioners … (with biographical details on each) The Illustrated London News 13 April 1844, p.233
© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
Fig.1
Easter Amusements – The Greenwich Pensioners … (with biographical details on each) The Illustrated London News 13 April 1844, p.233
© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
A living museum, Greenwich had become (within a few decades of the battle of Trafalgar) the ‘resting place’ of ‘national prowess on the ... ocean’, an entire pantheon to a now-past greatness whose human and cultural fragments were placed on conspicuous display in order that ‘a commercial world’ be reminded of its moral debts.6 For the architects of nineteenth-century Greenwich’s transformation, all members of London’s cultural élite, those debts were – it should be understood by the site’s visitors – owed to the political status quo, to the charismatic leadership naturally possessed by those of rank and to the heartfelt obedience of those who served under them. The latter could still be found in abundance at Greenwich, old sailors, the pensioned and policed veterans of naval warfare, who – when they were not to be found scattered around Greenwich Hospital like wreckage on the sea bed – were employed to serve as the mouthpieces for this sanctioned vision of the past (fig.1). As guides to the growing collection of portraits and seascapes hung in the nation’s ‘Naval Gallery’ (which covered the walls of the Painted Hall from 1824 onwards), the Pensioners’ attentive engagement with these art works was figured as an exemplary lesson in painting’s capacity to prompt and restore affective patriotism. As the journalist Henry Clarke put it in 1842:
Every blue-jacket [that is, every old sailor], may now ... reclaim from oblivion some anecdote of courage or of kindness. An attentive public, in listening to the unaffected strain, will learn to respect the knowledge displayed, and the generous effusions of a brave man’s heart ... From such observations a candid and judicious artist may learn how to improve his compositions: why some pictures ... fail to call forth the feelings of an unsophisticated public; whilst ... one of rude aspect, may kindle all the outward expression of deep-rooted sympathy.
The impact of such Pensioner soliloquies would therefore be perceived not only ‘in the improved taste ... and in the improved feelings’ of that ‘attentive public’ but also in the output of contemporary artists who, listening to the sailor’s ekphrastic recovery ‘from oblivion’ of past officer-class merit, might ‘learn how to improve his compositions’ so that they appealed to the better sentiments of plebeian audiences.7 Moreover, by inhabiting a public exhibition space aimed at the articulation of conservative ideals to an audience of increasingly – and, to some minds, worryingly – socially enfranchised urban day-trippers, painting was made to illustrate self-sacrifice in the name of a greater good. Only then, Clarke claimed, are ‘the arts of peace’made to put forth their best energies – to shed their lustre on the history of a nation’s bravest sons, and tempt the early germs of enthusiasm to rivalry with past greatness. This is the proper application of the art of painting.8
That medium appeared at Greenwich as a means of redressing the apparently diminished role of both élite example and popular heroism in a railway age, as a proactive presence capable of working its magic upon the political and moral sensibilities of its viewers decades, even centuries, after its own production.9 For Clarke (and he was merely echoed by the Naval Gallery’s other commentators), painting’s ‘proper application’ was to instantiate a past greatness that might thereby be raised up, resurfacing in the present to powerful (if reactionary) social and cultural effect.
This sense of painting’s ability to transcend the impact of change and the stark temporal difference wrought by modernity referenced the broader reconception of art’s powers which had been elaborated in aesthetic theory since the late eighteenth century. There, art had increasingly been deemed capable of challenging the distance not only between past and present but also between seeing and feeling.10 Furthermore, by the time that Clarke put pen to paper in the 1840s, the notion that both painters and their paintings might have such transformative effects on their viewers had come to be associated in particular with the works of one artist: Turner.
Joseph Mallord William Turner 'Fishermen at Sea' exhibited 1796
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Fishermen at Sea exhibited 1796
Oil paint on canvas
support: 914 x 1222 mm; frame: 1120 x 1425 x 105 mm
Purchased 1972
Tate T01585
T01585
Fig.2
Joseph Mallord William Turner
Fishermen at Sea exhibited 1796
In 1796, the year after the Naval Gallery had first been mooted, Fishermen at Sea (fig.2) appeared at the Royal Academy, the first oil painting to be exhibited by this artist, barely out of his teens. Hung (as was usual for lesser-known painters) in the Academy’s Ante Room, Fishermen at Sea shows Turner deploying his work’s relatively gloomy destination to his own ends by portraying the dazzling effects of searing moonlight as it emerges through a parting in the clouds to glow upon sea-water.11 As one reviewer noted, Turner had used significant artistic licence here to provide his scene with two pools of reflected moonlight rather than one; the overall effect was enough to draw his viewers in to gaze more closely upon his own public emergence and breakthrough as oil painter.12 Still almost unknown, Turner here produced a painting which – variously considered by exhibition critics to be the result of empirical observation or a more theoretical exercise in the laws of light – ‘has not its superior within the walls of the Academy’.13 It was not, one critic thought, an auspicious subject (‘Moon-lights are trite subjects’, he said) but Fishermen at Seaappeared to transcend the restrictions of literal meaning and cater immediately to its viewers’ capacity for aesthetic responsiveness. For exhibition critics, this was a pictur
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