Yacht Approaching the Coast

Ellie Schneider



J.M.W Turner, Yacht Approaching the Coast, 1845
BY ELLIE SCHNEIDER

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies:
And all that’s the best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies
         “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron

William Turner, the “painter of light,” started painting Yacht Approaching the Coast the same year as he completed his most famous work, the Slave Ship. He completed the work just six years before his death, so it does not look like the classic English landscape painting that his earlier paintings appeared to be. Like his later works, Yacht contains unrecognizable figures. Some described his later works as “fantastic puzzles” of color and light. In Yacht he plays with yellows and oranges as well as light and reflection in the water. While the painting appears happy, most of his later works came from a depressed place as his father, and former studio aid, died. His father’s death made a profound impact on his later works. His grief can be seen through his use of light, because the significance of the light was his way of viewing G-d’s spirit and heaven. While many works focus on ships or shipwrecks, when I look at Yacht, I am immediately drawn to the bright light. Even when I try to look at other parts of the painting, I am drawn back to the center of the light. It engulfs me and makes me feel warm and light.

Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty” caught my eye because it describes lightness and darkness, which Turner plays with in his works, as well as, the “tender light which heaven to gaudy day denies” which made me think of the light as G-d’s spirit as Turner had. Also, I found the painting to be pleasant and I felt similarly when reading the poem. They both made me feel warm and calm.

I also enjoy the painting on its own. I like the playfulness of the light and reflection, but it also feels a little violent with the dark ships on bottom. I think of  Yacht is when I am driving and I see an extremely bright sunset, but there is a cloud just blocking the sun from burning my eyes and instead the light shines in every other direction. I feel that Turner painted the sun so we are not directly his by the wonderful sunlight, but it is spread throughout nature and the rest of the painting. Going back to the idea that the light is G-d’s spirit, once way to view the light in this painting is that the viewer will not be touched by G-d’s spirit but the water and the rest of nature in the painting will and that G-d is working to spread himself in all directions. Another way to view it is that the cloud is blocking the sun from its full brightness and so we cannot get close enough to G-d’s spirit until we ascend to heaven.

When this project was assigned, I knew that I was going to write about Turner, because I like his color palette and style. Everything morphs together and things can be viewed in so many different ways. I enjoy looking and trying to piece together his “fantastic puzzles."
  • 7:00 AM

Theme and Variations: Raft of the Medusa

1818
Theme and Variations
Relating Music and Art
Curated by Becky Reilly

Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818



I might be biased because I played this piece for a piano recital, but I love Chopin's music.  He searches for technical perfection and yet still conveys the unbridled emotion characteristic of the Romantic period.  His "Op. 10 No. 4 (Étude in #C Minor)" and Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa actually have much in common.  The roiling, disquieting left-hand rolls that begin at 0:18 are the same waves that rock the raft, and both the piece and painting are painstakingly composed but still violent and sweeping.

Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa was inspired by a shipwreck off the coast of Mauritania.  Only fifteen members survived, engaging in cannibalism and shocking the public upon their return.  Géricault shows a moment in which the desperate sailors finally see their savior.  The artist went to great lengths to forge an accurate rendering of the event, speaking with survivors, visiting morgues to learn to paint the dead, verifying the raft's exact dimensions, reading newspaper articles, and attending the captain's trial.  For all his research, he still romanticizes some aspects.  Many of the figures look uncharacteristically healthy, and the poses and chiaroscuro echo earlier movements, almost like a history painting.  But the mix of utter despair and hope are shocking and real.

Chopin's études, like other musician's, were designed for students to study and practice certain techniques -- in this case, velocity.  There are few sustained notes throughout the piece.  He opts instead to write lines of rapid sixteenth notes.  Mastery of an étude means executing it with perfect technique.  The expression comes from the speed, accents, and dynamics.  I find these two works related and interesting because of the intricacies of their creation and careful composition that, opposite the restrained Neoclassical style, instead builds into emotional maelstrom.

  • 7:00 AM

The Forge

Goya
Francisco de Goya, The Forge, 1817

The experience of viewing Goya’s work has not been a pleasant one. First knowing him from The Third of May, I was blown away by his composition and ability to create mood and capture emotions. However, it seems rather hard to delve further into his art without getting creeped out by certain elements of his work that seem to work at a subconscious level. It becomes easier knowing his life story and the historical context. However, something else then arises in the appreciation of his work. Even though Goya’s composition and choosing of color to suggest mood are beyond criticism, and his subjects are always poignant and incisive, I was not entirely convinced by his skills of actually putting the brushes to canvas. It already sounds very presumptuous to say so, but I think it's fair to say that his figures are of some distance from those of neoclassicism’s painters and even periods previous to that. They seem unfinished and lack certain refinement. Though “refined” works are not necessarily - sometimes even the opposite of “good” works - Goya, nevertheless, took quite a leap from his predecessors. I am not sure if he had done so in better serving what he wanted to achieve through the entire work as a whole, just like those of El Greco and maybe later Picasso’s. But I wouldn’t be surprised and take them seriously, especially some of his etchings, if I saw them among the illustrations for books such as Oliver Twist. Perhaps I have to see his works up close to let brushworks and pigments reveal more about their significances. 

Enough of my ignorant questioning. The Forge demonstrates a similar style of The Third of May, and is recognized as a paradigm of his late work. The painting largely reminds me of Velazquez's Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan. However, despite a similar subject and composition, Goya turns the religious theme to a secular one. The god is removed, we are left with the down-to-earth, hardcore labor of the time: three muscular men soaked in sweat form an unshakable pyramid, hammering out the future of the nation. Set in plain and ambiguous surroundings, the painting becomes more symbolic than just a close observation of the lower class. Knowing that the painting was done at around the same time of the creation of The Third of May, it picks up another tone of depicting people's resistance to Napoleon's invasion. While the painting was dominated by black and gray, the red blazing metal and the white shirt attract the most attention, a similar method that was used in Third of May. With his back turning on us, we can't tell if they are the same guy. Perhaps Goya hoped that he had resurrected after being "crucified" by the French army, and joined the making of the future. 

  • 7:00 AM

The Grand Odalisque

Exoticism

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Grand Odalisque, 1814

As European empires continued to expanded their territories through the 19th century, the African and Asian countries that once were only seen by the most adventurous explorers, such as Marco Polo, were gradually unveiled, and provided the Europeans endless fascination. The legends and tales about far-off lands and people provided Europeans with wild and exotic images about those mysterious terrains. Artists like Ingres captured those popular imaginations on their canvas. Here, Ingres presented his French fellowmen an invitation to the mysterious, licentious world to the east.

Commissioned by Napoleon's sister Queen Caroline Murat of Naples, (unfortunately she was no longer the Queen when the painting was finished), The Grand Odalisque depicts a concubine in the harem, surrounded by oriental settings, in a pose that reminds me of Titian's Venus of Urbino. It's hard for me to understand how her left leg connects to her pelvis. However, her elongated, voluptuous body nevertheless is of great sensuality. And her cold, distant yet inviting facial expression arouses just the right amount of excitement; she acknowledges the presence of the voyeur, yet only offering a restrained temptation. In a sense, it almost seems like the Orient invites the European to come to their world, which is understood by Europeans as with force. But one has to understand it's an European interpretation of the Eastern world. Several other Ingres's work, such as The Turkish Bath, present a similar theme. In a way, these images of sexually promiscuous women lure Europeans to conquer and march into their bedrooms; at the same time, they help justify colonial expansion in that such immoral culture needs Western guidance. After all, when looking at this painting, who would say no to her invitation?

  • 7:00 AM

Fishermen at Sea and Dagon

Alex McDonald
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Fishermen at Sea, 1796
“I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium” – H.P. Lovecraft, “Dagon”

The ocean floor houses more secrets than the space in between planets and lies closer to home. Telescopes allow for scientists to glimpse places trillions of light years away, but they cannot clearly gaze upon the thinnest portion of Earth’s crust. We do not know what rests on the ocean floor. We do not know what lives there. But we do know things can lurk and survive in the deepest ocean trench. This dearth in knowledge shrouds the ocean in mystery, leaving the deep waters of the world as an unexplored frontier. And we always fear what we do not know.

In Turner’s Fishermen at Sea, a whirlpool threatens to swallow up the fishermen’s boat and drag them to a watery Hell. The ominous feeling arising from the overall darkness of Fishermen depicts the ocean as an unstoppable force of nature that possesses the powers of a god. The darkness also gives the ocean an aura of primordial ambiguity.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a horror and science fiction writer of the early 20th Century, also explored the god-like qualities and mysteries of nature in his short fiction, such as “Dagon.” Lovecraft, unlike Turner, embodies the dark savagery of nature in a fictitious pantheon of dark gods that take pleasure in tormenting humanity. In both Turner and Lovecraft’s work, man fights nature, and man loses. Repeatedly.

In “Dagon,” a man who has been stranded at sea during a WWI naval raid accidently sails his raft into a portion of the ocean floor that has mysteriously risen to the ocean's surface after a large earthquake. The man finds obelisks decorated in images of sea monsters and other odd life forms and eventually comes face to face with Dagon, a weather god Lovecraft borrowed from ancient Canaanite lore. In Lovecraft’s tale, Dagon appears in the form of some humanoid monster and later haunts the nameless protagonist after he gets back to dry land. Dagon embodies the power Turner’s ocean has over the fishermen. Turner and Lovecraft painted and wrote of nature's conquest of mankind.
  • 12:00 AM