Claude‐Joseph Vernet 1714–1789
NG 6600  
‘Calme’: A Landscape at Sunset with Fishermen returning with their Catch  
NG 6601  
‘Tempête’: A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas

Humphrey Wine, 2018

Extracted from:

Humphrey Wine, The Eighteenth Century French Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2018).
Humphrey Wine and Virginia Napoleone, Former Owners of the Eighteenth‐Century French Paintings in the National Gallery: Appendix to ‘The National Gallery Catalogues: The Eighteenth‐Century French Paintings’ (London: National Gallery Company, 2018).

Provenance

Originally commissioned in the summer of 1772 by Monsieur Billon, an Avignon silk merchant, on behalf of Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski, King of Poland (1732–1798) for 200 louis (4,800 livres) each,¹ but offered by Vernet on 10 March 1773 to the English banker Henry Hoare, as agent for Robert Clive, 1st Baron Clive of Plassey (1725–1774) (known as Clive of India);² offer accepted by Hoare on behalf of Clive by letter of 15 March 1773; dispatched by Vernet from Paris on 30 April 1773, payment on Clive’s behalf recorded by Vernet as being received in the first days of May;³ by descent to Clive’s eldest child, Edward Clive, 1st Earl of Powis (1754–1839); thence by descent through Edward Clive’s wife, Lady Henrietta Antonia Herbert (1758–1830) to George Charles Herbert, 4th Earl of Powis (1862–1952), and thence by inheritance; sold Sotheby’s, London, 10 July 2003, lot 65 for £2,357,600 including premium; stopped at export, and bought in 2004 by the Gallery with a donation given by David H. Koch through the American Friends of the National Gallery.

Exhibitions

Leeds 1868 (385; NG 6601) and (407; NG 6600); London [and Paris] 1976–7, (44 and 45);⁴ since 2004 on lifetime loan to David Koch .

Related Works

Paintings

• (1) Sale of Awbery Flory deceased, ‘brought from his residence in Berkshire … An Italian sea‐port, after Lord Clive’s Vernet – painted by Miss Wright’, Greenwood, London, 23–25 March 1790 (lot 6, 25 March 1790). ‘Miss Wright’ is presumably a reference to Elizabeth Wright, daughter of the Liverpool marine painter Richard Wright. She lodged with George Stubbs near Portman Square, London, after her father’s death in 1774.
• (2) Private collection, Connecticut, a good late eighteenth‐century variant copy in reverse of NG 6600 (to judge from a photograph), oil on canvas, 30 × 43 inches (76.2 × 109.2 cm), but said by the owner to have been in his family since 1754 and to have been attached prior to restoration to an original stretcher which has been carbon dated to the period 1700–40.
• (3) Private collection, Seaton, Devon, oil on canvas(?), a simplified copy in reverse after NG 6600 (so presumably after the print by Lerpinière) ‘approximately one‐third the size of the original’, according to the owner. The flag on the principal ship is a red ensign.
• (4) Christie’s, South Kensington, 29 October–2 November 2006, lot 2336, sold £900, a copy after NG 6600.

Prints

• (1) By Daniel Lerpinière (?1734–1785), published by John Boydell (1719–1804) in 1781, etching and engraving in reverse after NG 6600, 48.6 × 61.7 cm.⁵
• (2) By the same printmaker and publisher in 1782, etching and engraving in reverse after NG 6601, 49.7 × 60.8 cm.⁶

Technical Notes for NG 6600

In very good condition, NG 6600 was last restored in 2004, when it was strip‐lined and loose‐lined, and minor discoloured retouchings in the sky were removed. Areas where the pentimenti were especially noticeable, namely to the outline of the trees at right, owing to the increasing transparency of the top layers of paint with age, were toned down. Beside the pentimenti to those trees, there is a minor pentimento at the right of the clump of trees at the left of the painting just above the rock.

The canvas, which has its original tacking edges, all covered with a ground except that at the right, and which prior to its recent loose‐lining and strip‐lining had been unlined, is a fine plain weave with no joins. The tacking edges show pencil marks at regular intervals, suggesting that a squared grid was drawn over the upper ground layer, which is a pale grey, so as to transfer a drawn design to the canvas. The canvas has identical priming layers front and back to that of NG 6601 (see the Technical Notes for that painting, below) making the X‐radiographs difficult to read. However, they do indicate some irregularity in the priming layer along the bottom and extending through the bottom‐right corner. The preparation at the back would have both strengthened a canvas being prepared for travel, and acted as a moisture barrier.

Pigment analysis shows that the sky in NG 6600 is painted in finely ground natural ultramarine mixed with white. It was not possible to sample NG 6601 for the possible use of ultramarine. Vernet noted in his journal buying five ounces of ultramarine in 1770 through the artist Ludovico Stern.⁷ He continued buying ultramarine through Stern at least until 1774.⁸

The stretcher is the original, but is of a different construction to that of NG 6601, having horizontal and vertical cross‐bars and no corner braces. The bottom of the vertical cross‐bar was, however, missing and was replaced by the National Gallery in 2004. The reverse of the stretcher bears numerous labels or marks:

• (1) on a label in manuscript: ‘1868 Leeds 3 / The R.H. The Earl of Powis’
• (2) in thick pencil: ‘13’
• (3) a label printed in red: ‘Thos. Agnew & Sons Ltd. / W.O.1499/73’
• (4) a label printed in green: ‘Thos. Agnew & Sons Ltd. / W.O.0340/74’
• (5) a label inscribed in ink: ‘WO/4614/2’
• (6) a shipping agent’s label printed in red: ‘Atlantic / Tel: London. 0208 543 8584 / Paris. 00 33 1 42 43 21 21’ with (in manuscript) ‘34 2/2’
• (7) a bar‐coded label
• (8) both NG 6600 and 6601 have Sotheby’s labels, in connection with the auction sale of 10 July 2003.

Technical Notes for NG 6601

The condition is very good. There is a small T‐shaped tear, each limb of which is some 3 cm long at bottom left, just to the right of the man carrying a chest, and a tear some 5 cm long in the shape of an inverted T in the foreground rocks towards the right. There are slight abrasions to some localised areas of the sky, and some fine drying craquelure left of centre. Finally, there are two horizontal ‘gouges’, the first in the area of the thigh of the drowned woman, and the second to the right of the right‐hand ship – these are in the ground and have been painted over. NG 6601 was restored in 2004, when the old greyish varnish was removed, the retouchings which had covered the tears were removed, the damaged areas retouched, and the whole re‐varnished.

The canvas is a plain weave with no joins and retains its original tacking edges. It has been lined by Trevor Cumine, the picture liner, possibly in the 1970s and perhaps in connection with the 1976 exhibition (see above). There is a double ground, the lower layer being a very light grey composed of white pigment, probably lead white, some carbon black including charcoal particles and glassy particles, and an upper layer, mid‐grey in colour, composed of white pigment, probably lead white, charcoal black and some red lead. The reverse of the canvas has also been primed with a coating identical to the lower, light grey priming on the front. This was presumably applied at the same time as the lower ground, perhaps when the canvas had been stretched for priming. The effect is to ‘embed’ the canvas in a solid, rigid layer of lead white in oil, presumably to stiffen and protect it. These priming layers, front and back, appear firmly bonded to one another through the voids in the canvas weave, and were probably pushed onto each side of the canvas using a palette knife.

The stretcher, which once had a vertical central cross‐bar, has corner cross‐braces and may be the original. Its back bears the following:

• (1) a printed label: ‘National Exhibition / of / Works of Art /’ (then manuscript ink) ‘2’ (then printed) ‘Leeds, 1868 / Picture Galleries. / Proprietor /’ (then manuscript ink) ‘HRH The Earl of Powis’
• (2) another printed label: ‘Exhibition of Works of Art / Leeds, 1868. / No. of case or van’ (last word deleted in pencil, and then in pencil) ‘159 /’ (then printed) ‘No. of object’ (then in pencil) ‘1’
• (3) a label printed in red: ‘Thos. Agnew & Sons Ltd. / W.O.1500/73’
• (4) a label printed in green: ‘Thos Agnew & Sons Ltd. / W.O.0339/74’
• (5) in chalk: ‘TREVOR CUMINE’.

There are pentimenti to the right contour of the lighthouse and to the left‐hand curve of the foreground wave, and lesser pentimenti to the left‐hand outline of the foresail of the nearmost ship and to the proper left hand of the figure one from right.

Frames

The frames of both NG 6600 and NG 6601 are Louis XVI‐period carved and gilded moulding frames with a lamb’s tongue sight edge, a plain flat section and a carved pearl and fluted hollow back edge (fig. 1). They are most likely the original frames to which Vernet refers in his letter of 10 March 1773 to Henry Hoare (see below). However, the current gilding is not original, the frames at some point having been entirely re‐gilded in England.⁹

Discussion

Lord Clive was far from alone among British patrons in coveting a pair of marine views by Vernet in the early 1770s.¹⁰ He might already have been familiar with Vernet’s paintings, either from his 1768 trip to Paris or from the many pictures by the artist already in England.¹¹ At all events Clive was in Paris again in 1771.¹² From there he wrote to his secretary, Strachey (later Sir Henry Strachey, 1st Bt, 1737–1810), on 6 October 1771: ‘Vernet is the most delightful Landscape Painter I ever saw; two of his Pictures I saw at the Exhibition what were done for the Elector Palatine & I was so enchanted with them that I expressed a Wish of having two of the same. Would you believe me when I tell you he asked 12000 Livres as the current Price.’¹³ The paintings then seen by Clive were the pendant marines commissioned in 1769 for the Elector Palatine, Karl Theodor (1724–1799), for his gallery at Mannheim and exhibited at the 1771 Salon.¹⁴[page 505] They had been noted in Vernet’s record of commissions: ‘Du 16 octobre 1769. – Deux tableaux de quatre pieds et demy de large [146.2 cm.] sur la hauteur a proportion qui seroit de trois pieds [97.5 cm.] ou environ les sujets a ma fantaisie, un orage et une marine ou autre chose de mon genre, on me l’aisse le maitre du temps; ils ont été ordonnez par M. le baron … et ils sont pour l’Electeur Palatin; le prix est de cent cinquante louis chaque.’¹⁵ Vernet recorded receipt of payment on 15 February 1771,¹⁶ and paying packing costs for their delivery to Mannheim on 26 September of that year (figs 2 and 3).¹⁷ He also recorded Clive’s wish for similar paintings by reference to the Mannheim pair, the size of which had evidently been increased since being first commissioned. Hence, Vernet’s next entry in his list of commissions reads: ‘2 pr l’électeur Palatin / No 3 / 2 semblables pr la mesure pr milord Clive 3 pieds 6 ps [high] 5 pieds [wide]’, that is 113.7 × 162.4 cm.¹⁸ It was a pair in the increased size that Clive enquired about, before recoiling at the price. Early in May 1773, however, Clive did pay for two pictures of ‘Mannheim size’ by Vernet, and the price was 20 per cent less than that originally quoted.¹⁹ They were not, however, paintings he had commissioned. Instead they were a pair that had been commissioned by Stanislas Augustus, King of Poland, in June or July 1772 for 9,600 livres.²⁰ According to Vernet the substitution occurred because the king was slow to pay. On 10 March 1773 the artist wrote to the English banker, Henry Hoare, here acting as Clive’s agent and one who had himself bought paintings by Vernet:²¹ The second picture destined for the King of Poland, depicting a storm, is going to be finished at the end of this month; the other was done a few months ago. As I have had the honour to advise you; and both will be in a state permitting their being packed around the tenth or twelfth of April next … Although the King of Poland’s agent has assured me that the money for the two pictures will be here and that he will pay up towards the end of this month, I’m not relying on that, I’ll say nothing, and if someone comes to take and pay for the pictures, I shall say that in the uncertain situation that I found myself, I ceded them to others and that I could paint two other pictures, so long as the money was here … I’ve told no one but you, Monsieur, the secret of these pictures, and besides regarding what the King of Poland’s agent has told me, I’ve spoken to no one, but from all you know you see that I can cede them to whomsoever I like without anyone being able to find fault with my conduct or the uncertainty that I’m in ... For the rest, the frames of these two pictures have already been made and it is the King of Poland’s agent who has had them done; they are of a straightforward and noble taste, and I believe that the price will not exceed two hundred francs each, that is to say sixteen to seventeen louis for the two; but there is no need to be concerned about this; if the frames are not required, and they are to be made in London, I’ll willingly keep the present ones, having other pictures of this size to do. The size of the two pictures in question is spot on and exactly the same as that of Lord Arundell’s pictures which is five feet wide, and three and a half high, being French measurements; if the frames are to be made in London, you can measure by reference to the pictures of Lord Arundell, and commission them immediately so that they will be made in time for the arrival of the two pictures in question and one can straightaway enjoy them.²² Hoare must have known the discrepancy between the price Vernet had quoted Clive in 1771 and that due to be paid by Stanislas Augustus and decided for that reason not to disclose the identity of his client, whose own position, politically at least, was itself also precarious at this time.²³ That Vernet was ready to switch the pictures to an unnamed client of Hoare was likely in part because Hoare was someone with whom he and his father‐in‐law had [page 506]had successful dealings since 1765, as well as because of Stanislas Augustus’s situation.²⁴ As even a cursory glance at Vernet’s list of receipts indicates, he was usually paid for a pair of paintings after both had been completed.²⁵ In this case, however, within two months of completing NG 6600 Vernet was wondering whether Stanislas Augustus would ever be able to pay for it, let alone for its pendant as well. Vernet’s concerns were justified: Poland was then occupied by the troops of three foreign powers and was itself factionalised, and the news emerging from Warsaw was dire.²⁶ (In the event Vernet would paint another pair for Stanislas Augustus the following year,²⁷ in one part of which a temple in the Greek style, a motif the king apparently favoured,²⁸ was moved to the top of a steep cliff overlooking the harbour.) In the meantime Hoare, who was clearly attuned to Vernet’s wish to conclude the business as rapidly as possible, replied on 15 March 1773 on behalf of ‘one of his friends’ agreeing to buy the two paintings. On 17 March 1773 he sent Vernet’s letter of the previous week to Clive. He wrote that he was ‘happy in the thoughts of introducing 2 such fine Pictures into England, & doubly so, as They will be in your Lordships Collection’, and asked for Clive’s decision on the picture frames. On 3 May Vernet wrote to Hoare confirming that he had been paid on Clive’s behalf for the pictures, for the frames he had had made and for the packing costs,²⁹ and that all had been dispatched to Calais on 30 April. ‘I very much wish’, he wrote, ‘that you and your friend see [the pictures], and to learn if you are pleased with them; all those who have seen them here have appeared to be, and have flattered me that they were the amongst best I have done; for my honour and for my reputation I do hope that you and your friend find them such; I am most eager to have news of them from you.’³⁰ It is not known how Hoare replied. On 26 May he forwarded Vernet’s letter and his receipt to Clive, stating that he would arrange for the pictures to be delivered to Clive’s house in Berkeley Square, London, and in a postscript that he had learnt that the pictures had actually arrived in England.³¹ They were first hung in the Middle Drawing Room of 45 Berkeley Square, but during their ownership by Clive’s descendants they led a somewhat peripatetic existence among various family properties.³² There are no subsequent recorded dealings between Hoare and Vernet, but British patronage of the artist ceased around 1775.³³

In his first letter to Hoare, Vernet described both of the paintings now intended for Clive at some length: The [picture] is a setting of the sun whose disc is in the centre; in the background can be seen the horizon of the sea and mountains in mist. Next is the entrance to a port with a lighthouse and some fortifications; on the other side of the picture is a high mountain at the foot of which is a wood; and backing onto the wood is a temple in the Greek style on the sea shore,³⁴ on more or less the same level as the temple is a ship arriving with its sails being furled; and two launches are towing it to the mouth of a river discharging into the sea; the water in the foreground, forming part of the river, gives me the opportunity to paint trees and plants on the banks; and so there is landscape and sea view, this foreground is bedecked with numerous figures: fishermen unloading their catch from a boat, women waiting to get hold of them; a fisherman with a rod with his wife sitting next to him make a contrast to the sun’s disc, which is striking; overall this picture has a rich, harmonious composition; I dare to say that, following all the artists and connoisseurs who have seen it.The second picture shows a storm, and since that which thanks to your commission I had the honour to undertake for Lord Arundell seems to me to be a success and to please all those who have seen it, I have used more or less the same composition; without however there being the least thing alike; that is to say, I’ve painted a sky with a bolt of lightning bursting through thick cloud; an opening in the sky in the picture’s background which lights up the high mountains and a village below on which passing rain is falling from the sky. Atop some craggy rocks is a tower which serves as a lighthouse, on the surrounding fortifications of which signals are being given to vessels which are apparently making for the safety of a harbour or shelter³⁵ between the rocks; this part of the rocks on which the lighthouse rests is dark and contrasted with the high mountains behind which are in light; the sea is very dark as well from the horizon almost to the picture’s foreground, where the waves, the rocks and the figures are lit, something creating a striking effect; towards the middle ground is a ship in profile running before the wind to enter the harbour, another ship closer to the foreground prow on to the viewer, apparently positioning itself with a view to get into the same harbour, some debris from a launch broken against the rocks of the foreground has carried a number of people to safety on shore, who remove the items of most interest; a woman who is half dead whom some men are rescuing, another horrified woman is looking at her, some sailors are removing coffers, trunks etc., and the foreground of this painting is sufficiently ornamented with figures; that is to say as many as a launch can carry (for one must always show what is probable), as for the rest, although as I have said, the composition of this painting is arranged in the taste of Lord Arundell’s storm scene, there’s not the least object nor brushstroke which is the same, and I think that this storm scene here is well worth that of Lord Arundell; so, Sir, that is all I can tell you to give you some idea of these paintings.³⁶[page 507] After a digression concerning the payment situation with the King of Poland (see above), Vernet continued: I forgot, Sir, to mention in the description of the picture of the setting sun that there is in the foreground a path at the foot of a large rock along which a woman on a mule, a man and a dog are travelling together. Do please keep this letter so that, should the paintings come into the hands of your friend in London, you will be able to verify everything that I have just had the honour of telling you.³⁷ The several references to the Arundell pictures are to a moonlit scene and a storm at sea commissioned in November 1771 for Henry Arundell, 8th Baron Arundell of Wardour, also through Henry Hoare, and for which Vernet was paid in August 1772.³⁸ The Arundell Moonlight has disappeared since its sale at Wardour Castle in 1952,³⁹ but the storm scene, which Vernet was at pains to differentiate from the storm scene proposed for Clive, was recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art, Washington (fig. 4).⁴⁰ Vernet’s claim that, although the composition of NG 6601 was the same as that of the Arundell Shipwreck, ‘there’s not the least object nor brushstroke which is the same’, is broadly correct. Only two of the secondary figures in the Clive picture were borrowed (with slight adaptations) from those used in that for Arundell: the man bending over at the extreme left had appeared to the right of the woman with upraised arms in The Shipwreck, and the man at the extreme right lying on his stomach and holding onto a rock with his left hand had appeared at the extreme right of Arundell’s picture.

The angle of list of the nearest boat in NG 6601 is like that of the wreck in the Arundell picture, but it has three, not two, masts. True, the ship in the middle ground is like that in the right middle ground of the Arundell picture, but unlike the latter, which is being propelled by its foresail, fore‐top‐sail and main‐top‐sail, all of its sails have been furled except the foresail.⁴¹ Its flag may be an inaccurately rendered Red Ensign.⁴² One may suppose that these distinctions, and the wisdom or otherwise of the ships’ respective captains having regard to their distance from shore, would not have been lost on eighteenth‐century viewers. The lighthouse in NG 6601 is a fortress in the Arundell painting, the foliage at the top left is not (quite) the same, the foreground rock formations are distinct from each other and the sunlit mountains behind the lighthouse are additional. Had Vernet been cataloguing his paintings, he might have mentioned additional factual information, for example that the nearest ship in Calme is a two‐decker of fifty guns with a correct [page [508]][page 509] build for the 1770s, probably a warship since she is flying a long naval style pennant, and possibly an East Indiaman, and that her Dutch flag is exaggeratedly large; but that the heavily armed boats in Tempête were probably built forty or fifty years earlier, their short pennants identifying them as (armed) merchantmen.⁴³ That in the middle distance towards the left is single‐decked and appears to be flying a British Red Ensign. It appears similar in construction to that shown broadside on in Robert Dodd’s English Ships in Table Bay, 1787 (fig. 5).⁴⁴ The ship on the right is twin‐decked. The gun‐ports of the lower deck are closed, presumably on account of the heavy seas.

Vernet’s descriptions of the paintings destined for Clive were essentially concerned with their composition and with their effects of light, as well as (implicitly by the nature of the commission) the contrasting states of nature depicted. He echoes, and the two paintings for Clive visualise, the words of the abbé Gougenot published in 1748 in praise of landscape painting as a genre: If ever there is a subject susceptible to action and to variety, they are pictures of landscape subjects; it is not possible to suppose nature remaining in the same state for an instant. Landscape changes and varies as many times as the sun’s light which illuminates it. Nature appears to you one moment bright and full of light, such that everything is subject to the brightness of the sun; a moment later a storm arises, the sky darkens, those houses which were formerly dull in tone in their turn become bright in comparison with the clouds...⁴⁵ Gougenot was using terms ‘action’ and ‘variété’ more commonly employed in relation to history painting, but what Vernet claimed to be striking was the contrejour effect of the fisherman and woman beside him against the sun in Calme, and the contrasts of light in Tempête. Had Vernet been thinking as a history painter,⁴⁶ rather than just borrowing from history painting a Lamentation‐like group for Tempête, albeit modified to include a bare‐breasted female passenger being rescued by men,⁴⁷ he might have pointed out to Hoare that the narratives of the two storm scenes differ: whereas there are a number of figures in the Arundell picture whose fate remains uncertain, the situation of all the figures but one in NG 6601 is resolved. Other than the woman whom Vernet characterised as half‐dead (and for whom her rescuers appear to be doing nothing effective by way of revival), the other figures have certainly survived, or were never in danger. Had he been seeking to emulate Diderot, who wrote of his experience contemplating a shipwreck scene by Vernet at the 1767 Salon: ‘Je voyais toutes ces scènes touchantes, et j’en versais des larmes réelles’,⁴⁸ and who was not alone in being moved by Vernet’s scenes of shipwreck,⁴⁹ his description of Tempête might have been more emotive in identifying with the victims of the storm rather than describing their attitudes.⁵⁰ Instead of this, only once in his long letter to Hoare did Vernet refer to the emotional state of any of his figures (when he wrote of ‘une … femme épouvantée’). Nevertheless, given the frequency with which viewers of his storm scenes wrote of their affective nature, it is likely that Vernet knew what he was doing by incorporating into them what Conisbee called ‘a miniature theatre of gesture and expression’.⁵¹

Since it was probably the encounter at the 1771 salon with the Mannheim pair that was at the origin of Clive’s acquiring NG 6600 and NG 6601, and since Vernet was at pains to differentiate these paintings from the Arundell pair, it is worth reciting both Diderot’s reaction to the Mannheim pair and Gabriel Bouquier’s poem on the Arundell Shipwreck. The sentiments in both were equally applicable to NG 6601. Of the Mannheim Storm Diderot wrote: A ship broken against an enormous rock by the gale has sunk low in the water, only its rigging is visible. The storm, barely past, continues to disturb the sky, lightning flashes in the distance and strikes below. Here Horace’s precept is masterfully observed, everything is drawn out of the subject of the picture, everything tends towards the action of it. There, some sailors save an unfortunate without clothes – struggling against death he catches and grips onto the length of a piece of rope held out to him so he can reach the mast, his only hope. Here, a woman who has escaped the fury of the waves is dragged away from them by some helpful sailors; all that one sees are the dire effects of the anger of this cruel element. Far from coasting, M. Vernet has, I think, surpassed himself in this production, which is of enormous effect and truthfulness … (What a sky! What waters! What rocks! What depth! How this light illuminates these waters! He repeats himself somewhat in his shipwreck scenes: the same figures, and a sameness of attitude and situations. [Then enigmatically] [He is] lost in small subjects; hence [page 510]landscapes lacking soul or truthfulness, trees lacking tones or nuances.) Of the other Mannheim picture, Un Paysage et Marine, au coucher du soleil, Diderot wrote: This piece has all the force of the previous one, if it does not surpass it, given the difficulty. [Claude] Le Lorrain is certainly no more true or warm, perhaps he is less straightforward in his touch and has a less fertile imagination for beautiful views than M. Vernet, who combines this superiority with that of depicting figures, a talent Claude lacked.⁵² Bouquier’s verses on the Arundell Shipwreck included the following lines: ‘Autour de leurs débris, sur le sable entassés, / Blanchis par la vague fumante, / S’agite une troupe tremblante / D’infortunés luttant contre le sort: / L’un, par un vigoureux effort, / S’accroche au mât, courbé vers le rivage: / Un autre, le long d’un cordage / Se glisse, & le poids de son corps / Semble le ramener encor / Dans cet abyme épouvantable, / Où regnent l’horreur la mort … / Le coeur serré, plaignant la nature souffrante, / VERNET, je quitte les Tableaux / Où l’horreur, sous ta main savante, / Glace mon sang dans ses canaux …’⁵³ The phrase ‘le coeur serré’, ‘the heart is gripped’, had then recently been used by the unknown author of Lettre I (7 September 1771) in Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la République des lettres in relation to the Mannheim pair when they were exhibited. Of the storm scene, he wrote: ‘The heart is gripped; everything that these poor souls that he [Vernet] paints, you feel; you see the sky half open, the fall of lightning and the sea engulfing a ship.’ Then, clearly stating how the author’s emotions were affected by the scene being paired with a scene of calm, and perhaps in what order the paintings were expected to be seen, he continued, ‘At the sight of a Landscape and marine view at the setting of the sun tranquillity returns; all the calamities of the other scene are forgotten, and you take part in the peaceful pursuits of the latest actors in the scene, or take pleasure in their pleasures.’⁵⁴

As Conisbee pointed out, one should not underestimate the affective nature of Vernet’s pendants, one of which represented violent weather and one benign nature, and for which Edmund Burke provided a timely categorisation in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757; first French edition 1765).⁵⁵ Nor should the appeal to art‐buyers of possessing paintings allegedly better than those of the then much admired Claude be discounted. Vernet’s landscapes and seascapes, and the effects of weather, were perceived as true to nature, and the ships in his marine views were based on careful observation.⁵⁶ These qualities enhanced their emotional impact, especially of the storm scenes, whose drama was also being exploited with special effects in the theatre by Philippe‐Jacques de Loutherbourg, a landscape painter and theatre scenographer whose landscapes and marines owed much to Vernet.⁵⁷ Both theatrical and painted shipwrecks were fictional representations of an ever‐present reality in an age when losses at sea were commonplace.⁵⁸ English readers would probably also have been familiar with William Falconer’s The Shipwreck (1762), a lengthy, frequently reprinted tragic poem, which evoked empathetic responses to shipwreck victims: ‘Sad refuge! ALBERT [the captain] hugs the floating mast; / His soul could yet sustain this mortal blow, / But droops, alas! Beneath superior woe; / For now soft nature’s sympathetick chain / Tugs at his yearning heart with powerful strain; / this faithful wife for ever doom’d to mourn / For him alas! Who never shall return; / To black adversity’s approach expos’d. / With want and hardships unforeseen enclos’d: / His lovely daughter left without a friend, / Her innocence to succour and defend.’⁵⁹

There were numerous contemporary accounts of actual shipwrecks. In one, first published in Bordeaux in 1768 and soon after translated into English and Dutch, the French sailor, Pierre Viaud tells of being caught in a storm in 1766 on route from the West Indies to Louisiana: What an age of night it was! A deluge of rain fell upon us, all the while, the store house of the waters seemed to have been broken open, the waves rising every instant covered our bark [sic], and rolled their mountains o’er our heads; the thunder roared through the air, and the quick intervals of lightning only served to open to us the horrid prospect of a boundless horizon, and a devouring sea, ready to swallow us up, every moment, which was as quick succeeded by the most dismal darkness.⁶⁰ In 1782 Samuel Waller Prenties published Narrative of a Shipwreck on the Island of Cape Breton, in a voyage from Quebec 1780. As Jean‐Louis Deperthes explained in his Histoire des naufrages, ou recueil des relations les plus interessantes des naufrages (Paris [1790], three volumes comprising accounts of some forty shipwrecks), Prenties’s account was reprinted five times within eighteen months after first publication, and translated into French in 1785.⁶¹ Evidently, there was a significant public appetite for such narratives, and in what may have been a dig as much at Vernet and other painters of storm scenes as at fictional accounts of storms at sea, Deperthes claimed that those in his book, moving and varied as they were, were all the more interesting for being based on true events.⁶² A later newspaper report of an actual incident is striking for reading like an ekphrasis of a painting by Vernet, and indeed of the reaction of viewers to seeing it: Margate, August 30 [1792].
The inhabitants and visitors of this place were yesterday evening shocked with a spectacle, that excited every emotion of horror: – it was, apparently, a Danish vessel, of about 300 tons burthen, that struck upon the sands, about a league and a half from the pier, in a very tempestuous sea. She was gradually sinking for about eight minutes, when she wholly [page 511]disappeared. – By the assistance of glasses, two of the unhappy mariners were discovered clinging to the top of the mast to the last moment, when they followed the wretched fate of their companions. The surge was so great, that none of the boats here dare venture out to their assistance, though the seamen on board the vessel made many signals of distress.⁶³ Calme and Tempête bought by Lord Clive are, as Conisbee proposed, ‘without question two of Vernet’s very greatest marine pictures, and the type of work for which he was most famous in his day’.⁶⁴ Executed originally for a royal patron, but acquired in their original frames by a famous Englishman for a collection in which they remained for over two hundred years, they represent the last great pair of marine views by Vernet still belonging to a United Kingdom collection, and typify both the artist and the taste in England for his works.

General References

Lagrange 1864, pp. 76, 349 (C.247), 351 (C.258) and pp. 367–8 (R.168); Ingersoll‐Smouse 1926, vol. 2, nos 960 and 961, figs 239 and 240 (the Lerpinière engravings) and pp. 113–14; Bence‐Jones 1971, pp. 1446–8; National Gallery Review 2005, pp. 18–19.

Notes