The Sublime in Crisis: Landscape Painting after Turner

Alison Smith

In the latter half of the nineteenth century some artists abandoned the pursuit of the
sublime for reasons of taste, others because of an increased interest in beauty and
scientific realism. Nevertheless, as Alison Smith writes, the sublime still held great
importance for many Victorian artists, even as they distanced themselves from the
sublime of the Romantic era.
This essay examines the various ways in which British landscape painters engaged with concepts of the
sublime in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the visual arts the sublime tends to be associated
with the period of roughly 1750–1850 when a new emotional response to landscape first developed in the
work of Romantic painters, and found full expression in the art of J.M.W. Turner. The general view is that
the term lost its former currency after 1850 due to a shift in aesthetic and cultural values, and that it gave
way to beauty as the most compelling aesthetic ideal.1
This essay considers why the sublime should have fallen out of favour in intellectual circles, using this as
the background to examine various ways in which artists continued to engage with the concept in
landscape painting during this so-called recessive period. Because so little published material exists on the
idea of the sublime in the Victorian period, this essay takes the form of case studies of works in the Tate
collection to pose questions about the category. Although this approach might be regarded as restrictive in
not allowing for a central narrative, the heterogeneity of the chosen examples does enable coverage of the
principle areas in which the subject manifested itself in British landscape painting. The test cases show
that although the sublime may have been in crisis, it nevertheless continued to have an impact in
multifarious ways. While these ways might be regarded as marginal to mainstream artistic tendencies, they
are too important to be overlooked, especially as they engage with contemporary social, scientific and
cultural developments.
I start by asking if there was something peculiar to the aesthetic ideals which predominated in the mid-
nineteenth century that caused the sublime to drop out of circulation, and then proceed to look specifically
at the Pre-Raphaelite landscape, at works which ostensibly eschewed the visual rhetoric of the sublime out
of a concern for objectivity and ‘truth’, but which at the same time offered new ways of harmonising
analysis with symbolism in confronting themes such as judgement, vastness, transcendence and terror, all
traditionally regarded as manifestations of the sublime. In the second part of the essay I look at the return
to ‘affect’ – the explicit appeal to emotion through expressive painterly means – in the later nineteenth
century, at works which seem to signal a revisiting of the Romantic and Turnerian models of the sublime
but within a more troubled theological framework informed by the spirit of agnosticism that followed in the
wake of the evolutionary theories advanced by Charles Darwin, and that in some cases can be regarded
as a visual parallel to the art critic John Ruskin’s notion of the grotesque.
Burke’s sublime
Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
continued to be the central text for the sublime in Britain during the nineteenth century. In this work Burke
explored the sublime in terms of physiologically related responses to phenomena, referring to it as an
instinct of self-preservation:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the idea of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort
terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of
the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling ... When
danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at
certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day
experience.2
For Burke the main causes of the sublime were darkness, obscurity, privation or vastness – qualities he
associated more with terror than elation. On the continent, Immanuel Kant’s interpretation of the sublime
dominated. This differed from Burke’s theory in focusing more on the concept as a mental condition, or an
aesthetic experience that emerged from a strain in perceiving something boundless or infinite. While Kant
appreciated the usefulness of Burke’s approach he felt a definition that depended on the sensations of
individuals was too empirically based to lead to any satisfactory explanation of how the sublime functioned.
Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry raises a number of issues for the period in question. First, the extent to
which the associative nature of the sublime goes against the innate character of painting. Second, there is
the problem of the association of the sublime with fear rather than elation. Both these issues would seem
to militate against the mainstream use of the sublime in relation to the art of the later nineteenth century
where the principle directions would appear to be a realism defined in terms of particular, clearly
articulated forms or an idealism focused on pure beauty as seen in the classical and aesthetic styles that
emerged after 1860 which aimed at eliciting disinterested rather than disturbed emotion in the beholder. In
these circumstances the Burkean sublime could be seen as an ‘other’ that continued to have an impact but
arguably more in the field of popular culture, theatrical entertainment and illustration than in fine art.
Turner’s sublime
Any discussion of the sublime in the second half of the nineteenth century should start with Turner. Of all
Romantic painters influenced by the aesthetic of the sublime, his works have been widely recognised as
the most successful in capturing the effect of boundlessness which Burke and Kant saw as a prerequisite
for the sublime in verbal and visual representation – the sublime being something that can be evoked but
not achieved.3 Those works by Turner typically seen as sublime employ a formal language that avoids
precise definition, instead using paint to hint at the terrifying and awesome but on a relatively modest scale
when compared to the bombastic productions of painters such as Francis Danby and James Ward.
Through juxtapositions of dark and light, obtrusive facture and subtle blending effects, combined with
energetic centrifugal and vortex configurations and exaggerated distortions of scale, Turner’s works have
been seen to both elevate and inspire perception in the beholder.
This view owes much to John Ruskin’s championing of the artist in his book Modern Painters. Ruskin was
the most important English art critic of his time with a career spanning almost the entire reign of Queen
Victoria. Because he was such a prolific writer – the standard edition of his works amounts to thirty-nine
volumes – his criticism is useful for calibrating the shifts in aesthetic judgement that took place during the
period. A figure of quasi-biblical authority in his own day, Ruskin was one of the first critics to write about
art with poetry and feeling, and it was the unprecedented intensity of the language he used to evoke the
sublime that helped elevate the status of art criticism in British writing. In particular, it was the force and
conviction with which Ruskin relayed what he felt to be the sublime pessimism of Turner’s art that
influenced subsequent opinion about the greatness of the artist’s work, overcoming contemporary
objections that his abstract compositions appeared incomprehensible, even ridiculous, like soap or
treacle.4 One could even go so far as to argue that it was Ruskin who made Turner sublime by rescuing
the visual from itself and returning it to language.
In his Philosophical Enquiry Burke emphasised literary forms, especially poetry, as more capable of
expressing the sublime than the visual arts, projecting the sublime as an idea that only the verbal could
evoke:
The images raised by poetry are always of this obscure kind ... But painting, when we have allowed for the
pleasure of imitation, can only affect simply by the images it presents; and even in painting a judicious
obscurity in some things contributes to the effect of the picture; because the images in painting are exactly
similar to those in nature; and in nature dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the
fancy to form the grander passions than those have which are more clear and determinate. 5
Ruskin’s writings on Turner appear to support Burke in suggesting that the word is more successful in
evoking the sublime because it is so radically different from what it seeks to describe, whereas the visual
image, while having greater potential to represent forms which give rise to the experience of the sublime,
risks collapse at the point of expression. The paradox of the visual is thus that it offers the promise of
realising the sublime, aspiring to bridge the gap between language and translation, but at the risk of
descending into banality, formula or illustration.

J.M.W. Turner
Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) 1840
Oil on canvas
90.8 x 122.6 cm
© 2012 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Fig.1

J.M.W. Turner
Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) 1840

© 2012 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

One of the most celebrated passages in Ruskin’s writings is his ekphrasis, or literary description of a work
of art, on Turner’s Slave Ship or Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming
On 1840 (fig.1), in which metaphor and simile are taken to extremes, allowing Ruskin to repaint the scene
in words. Thus he could vicariously involve the spectator in the drama and convey the idea of nature as a
vehicle of divine judgement:
Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of night, which gathers
cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labours amidst the lightning of
the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky, in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue
which signs the sky with horror and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, and, cast far along the
desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incardines the multitudinous sea. 6
Although this passage acknowledges the Burkean sublime – the experience of terror and awe induced by
the description eliciting an intense emotional response in the reader – it was published in the first volume
of Modern Painters (1843) in which Ruskin also explicitly rejected the sublime as a discrete category:
Anything which elevates the mind is sublime, and elevation of mind is produced by the contemplation of
greatness of any kind ... Sublimity is, therefore, only another word for the effect of greatness upon the
feelings – greatness, whether of matter, space, power, virtue, or beauty: and there is perhaps no desirable
quality of a work of art, which, in its perfection, is not, in some way or degree, sublime. 7
As the scholar George Landow has explained, since Ruskin believed the perception of beauty was a
moral, even a religious act, he could not accept the depreciation of the beautiful implied by Burke’s
opposition of it to the sublime even though he respected the main parts of Burke’s thesis, namely that the
sublime was concerned with greatness, that it was a matter of emotion and that it related to religion or the
idea of the holy.8
By 1853 Ruskin had shifted his position to accept the sublime as a separate aesthetic category that related
to the experience of awe and terror, but he still struggled with the Burkean notion of ‘terrible sublimity’,
maintaining that a susceptibility to terror was a sign of religious doubt, even atheism. Ruskin’s
acknowledgment of ‘terrible sublimity’ can thus be seen as an indication of his difficulty in understanding
nature on a theological basis, especially as he focused his analysis of the sublime in terms of its effect on
the beholder. If the sublime was not a manifestation of divine power and moral judgement working through
nature, it risked being merely horrid, incapable of elevating the mind or the imagination. On a personal
level, as his faith wavered towards the end of the 1850s, Ruskin found himself overwhelmed and
depressed by ‘the cruelty and ghastliness of the Nature I used to think so sublime’. 9 His solution to the
problem of salvaging any sense of moral awareness from the sublime was to evolve the concept of the
‘grotesque’ or the ‘symbolic sublime’ in the third volume of Modern Painters (1856). Recognising that the
sublime was beyond representation, Ruskin felt it could be recognised in part through symbols or the
fragmented and disordered images that accompany but do not in themselves constitute greatness. 10
Pre-Raphaelitism and the anti-sublime
Ruskin’s oscillating views on the sublime offer one important route into our exploration of how the topic
was expressed in visual terms in the latter half of the nineteenth century, particularly in helping us to
understand the difficulties artists had in articulating and expanding the Romantic sublime as it had
developed up to the time of Turner.11
According to the scholar Morton Paley, the apocalyptic sublime was a mode that flourished during a period
of domestic unrest and foreign wars. It was a means of displacing into art the political and social
dislocations produced by the turbulence of that era, as well as expressing the fervent religious evangelical
belief that came to be challenged later in the century.12 However, apocalyptic imagery continued to
dominate throughout the Victorian period, in dioramas and panoramas and in what have been regarded as
the populist landscapes of John Martin. Martin’s immense triptych The Last Judgement 1851–3
(Tate N05613, T01928 and T01927) was one of the major works that astonished the public in the years
immediately after Turner’s death, and continued touring until the 1870s. It was shown in New York in 1856
to great acclaim where it fuelled the ‘American Sublime’ as seen in the art of landscape painters such as
Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt whose works were well known in Britain. The sublime also
continued to make its presence in regional landscape painting, particularly in Wales and Scotland, notable
exponents of the genre including Henry Clarence Whaite and Horatio MacCulloch. Beyond Britain the
Romantic sublime flourished on the periphery of the British Empire and was often employed to represent
unfamiliar subjects, as in Edward Lear’s Kinchinjunga from Darjeeling, India of 1879 (Yale Center for
British Art, New Haven).
However, it would be true to say that by the middle of the century a new aesthetic was in the ascendant.
The year 1851 can be seen to represent a watershed regarding the sublime. The demise of its two great
exponents in literature and art – Wordsworth in 1850 and Turner in 1851 – has been taken to represent the
passing of a sublime moment in British culture. The failure of the Chartist uprisings of 1848 to have any
lasting effect, and the spirit of confidence and prosperity generated by the Great Exhibition of 1851, have
suggested to historians that a spirit of equipoise or balance between the claims of the past and the forces
of modernity dominated the mid-Victorian period, negating any need for such an extreme aesthetic form as
the sublime.
J.M.W. Turner
Rain, Steam and Speed 1844
The National Gallery, London
Photo © The National Gallery 2011
Fig.2

J.M.W. Turner

Rain, Steam and Speed 1844

The National Gallery, London

Photo © The National Gallery 2011

Admittedly, industrialisation itself could be seen to offer another possible language of the sublime, in
contrast to the grand natural scenes that had inspired the Romantics. However, Ruskin’s antipathy to the
incursion of industrialisation into art – as exemplified by his comment that Turner painted Rain, Steam and
Speed 1844 (fig.2) ‘to show what he could do with so ugly a subject’ – informed a general perception that
the material conditions of the Industrial Revolution helped bring about a crisis in the sublime by degrading
the natural world and proposing that it could be manipulated for utilitarian purpose and gain. 13 The
influence of the natural sciences, particularly geology, on painting and the concomitant idea that landscape
as a genre should aspire to objectivity, as nature was measurable and capable of being defined in precise
analytic terms, further problematised the sublime, undermining academic idealist theory and disavowing
the possibility of overwhelming aesthetic experience.
The challenges presented by science, religious doubt and positivist philosophy which accompanied the
shift to an urban secular society, informed, in turn, the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic. Pre-Raphaelite painters
set out to valorise the familiar and everyday in a spirit of reaction to the artificiality and elitism of the
Romantic sublime, which they felt had descended into pictorial cliché in the work of contemporary
academic painters. A similar ‘democratic’ approach underpins the novels of George Eliot, who was
influenced by developments in landscape sensibility through the work of Ruskin and the cult of detailed
naturalism espoused in Pre-Raphaelitism. In Adam Bede (1859) Eliot writes:
In this world there are so many of these common coarse people ... It is so needful we should remember
their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy and frame lofty
theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore, let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us
always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things
– men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven
falls on them. There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. 14
Sir John Everett Millais, Bt 1829–1896
The Order of Release 1746 1852–3
Oil on canvas
support: 1029 x 737 mm; frame: 1505 x 1210 x 125 mm
Tate N01657
Presented by Sir Henry Tate 1898
N01657
Fig.3

Sir John Everett Millais, Bt

The Order of Release 1746 1852–3

Tate N01657
Just as Eliot alludes to Dutch genre painting to support her claims for the everyday as a suitable subject
for the novelist, so certain Pre-Raphaelite painters made reference to literature when attempting a similar
reversal of aesthetic standards, with the ordinary taking precedence over the sublime. In a letter to his
fellow artist John Lucas Tupper in 1879, William Holman Hunt admitted that after reading poetry by Percy
Bysshe Shelley he had no enthusiasm for the sort of writing which deals with nothing but ideal, ethereal,
psychical and intangible subjects: ‘I do not estimate so highly the genius which makes an impression by
such management of such sublime subjects as I do that which shews us beauty and noble lessons in
familiar things.’15 The following month he wrote about the greatness of John Everett Millais’s The Order of
Release 1746 1852–3 (fig.3, Tate N01657) after seeing it again in the Joseph Arden sale at Christie’s:
‘You must not think I am gushing in thus praising it. Of course I dont [sic] mean that it is a sublime or an
imaginative work – except as is best suited to the subject ... but the keenness and capacity and the
healthiness of mind in it and the unerring reliability of eye, hand and sensuous instinct are quite
supreme.’16
In light of this sort of comment it is possible to detect a trajectory in the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic that can
be described as ‘anti-sublime’. By comparing the landscapes painted by artists such as Hunt, John Brett
and J.W. Inchbold with those of Turner, it can be seen that the former are distinguished from the latter by a
lack of obtrusive facture coupled with a deliberate avoidance of meteorological elements as vehicles of
sentiment. This can be read as a deliberate rejection of the visual conventions of the sublime. Central to
the Pre-Raphaelite enterprise was its mission of truth to nature, an objective which entailed the accurate
study of natural phenomena such as rocks and vegetation. Pre-Raphaelite landscapes are typically small
scale, bright, densely articulated and distinguished by abrupt disjunctions of scale and non-linear flattening
qualities. In eschewing the Burkean idea of darkness and obscurity in favour of precise delineation, the
artists involved in the movement saw nature as something to be inspected and understood, and conveyed
in precise analytic terms. The empiricism that underpins the ideology of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape
went hand in hand with a suburban outlook, a rejection of the traditional loci of the sublime in favour of
mundane places, which, for Ruskin among others, were not worthy of representation.
Despite his keen interest in Pre-Raphaelitism Ruskin could not abide landscapes that showed evidence of
human interference, hence his disapproval of Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed and Ford Madox
Brown’s An English Autumn Afternoon 1852–5 (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery).17 In a frequently
quoted exchange with Brown, Ruskin asked the painter why he had chosen ‘such a very ugly subject’ for
his work, painted from the first-floor back window of the house in which Brown lodged in Hampstead High
Street, looking north-east towards the neighbouring suburb of Highgate. The artist’s terse reply, ‘Because
it lay out of a back window’, was not just a spontaneous response to the unexpectedness and rudeness of
Ruskin’s comment but one which betrays his disavowal of the picturesque and sublime qualities Ruskin
found in Turner.18
It was not just the site that offended Ruskin but also Brown’s representation of a couple in the foreground
surveying a prospect replete with activity. As the scholar Alistair Wright has argued, it is this very act of
looking that ‘desublimates’ the landscape, signalling a departure from accepted ways of viewing painted
landscapes which ‘typically demand looking at the landscape with eyes freed from attention to the material
realities of the scene, envisioning landscape not as land but as pure visual stimulus, to be cast into an
artistic category such as the sublime or the picturesque’. 19 The introduction of contemplative watchers was
an effective device for showing how aesthetic experience could be focused on the observing subject. The
works of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, for example, frequently include a figure
seen from behind gazing upon a view. But whereas the scenes depicted in Friedrich’s landscapes give a
strong sense of perceiving something infinite and limitless, the proliferation of information in Brown’s
painting invites us to attend to the specifics of the prospect thus undermining the unifying experience of the
sublime.

John Constable 1776–1837

Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath, with a Boy Sitting on a Bank circa 1825
Oil on canvas
support: 333 x 502 mm; frame: 579 x 747 x 105 mm
Tate N01813
Bequeathed by Henry Vaughan 1900
N01813
Fig.4

John Constable

Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath, with a Boy Sitting on a Bank circa 1825

Tate N01813
An English Autumn Afternoon also differs from a composition like John Constable’s depiction of
Hampstead Heath, Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath, with a Boy Sitting on a Bank c.1825 (fig.4,
Tate N01813), in rejecting standard compositional devices such as framing elements, gradations of tone
and the energetic brushwork that imbues the pastoral with a sense of the sublime in the latter’s work. The
viewing boy in Constable’s painting projects the spectator into the scene but also serves to elicit from the
viewer admiration for the dazzling display of brushwork that unites what is seen into a single aesthetic
experience, in contrast to the fragmentation of vision that characterises Brown’s work. As Wright contends,
the insistent presence of the represented spectators in Brown’s painting sets up a barrier between the
viewer and the landscape making it difficult to look past them in any disinterested way, thereby
desublimating the landscape.
Victorian geology and the sublime: William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay
The Pre-Raphaelite emphasis on particularity was paralleled by the great surge of interest in natural
history during the mid-nineteenth century, with its panoptic scope and sense of awe generated by the
infinitude and intricacy of the natural world. The term ‘science’, which had formerly meant ‘knowledge’ in a
general sense, was now taking on a more specialised modern meaning. It had a particular appeal for
artists who upheld ‘truth’ as the primary goal of art. As the geologist D.T. Ansted argued in an essay on
science and art in Art Journal in 1863:
if truth is once lost sight of, all that is taught leads only to error and confusion and a false appreciation of
beauty. There should indeed be no worship of nature, for Art must not be pantheistic; but to ensure due
appreciation without misdirected enthusiasm, truth alone is sufficient and necessary. 20
Paradoxically, the emphasis on specificity which science bestowed on the humanities offered a new
language for evoking the sublime, as science opened up fresh insights on unfathomable concepts such as
time, space and existence, which both enthralled and terrified the beholder.
William Dyce 1806–1864
Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of October 5th 1858 ?1858–60
Oil paint on canvas
support: 635 x 889 mm; frame: 950 x 1200 x 125 mm
Tate N01407
Purchased 1894
N01407
Fig.5

William Dyce

Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of October 5th 1858 ?1858–60

Tate N01407
William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay, Kent – A Recollection of October 5th 1858 ?1858–60 (fig.5, Tate N01407) is
at first sight a melancholy static image with the small central figure of an oyster-catcher isolated against
crumbling chalk bluffs and the overarching evening sky. The foreground figures direct the viewer’s gaze
both to the minutiae of the seashore and out of the picture to an imagined space across the water. The
emphasis on the prosaic and everyday, together with the fragmentation of vision caused by detailed
representation across the pictorial surface, led some critics to pronounce the picture a travesty of the
sublime. The Illustrated London News considered the work to be ‘a very curiosity of minute handiwork ...
being painted in the finest of fairy like lines ... with a completeness and exactness which render every
microscopic detail palpable to the naked eye’, but concluded that the ultimate effect of such representation
was ‘a rapid descent from the sublime to the droll’.21
The final comment is indicative of Dyce’s radical departure from the traditional language of the sublime in
attempting a new form of visual expression. In the painting, the beholder’s experience of awe is generated
by a sense of vastness signalled by the faint rendition of Donati’s comet in the sky observed only by the
artist-spectator holding a telescope on the right of the painting. The comet is so remote in space as to be
nearly invisible to the naked eye and is not heeded by the various family members on the beach.22 The
myopic gaze of the two centrally placed women is focused on the task of collecting shells or fossils, which
signify deep time and, like the comet, render the individual human life insignificant by comparison. By
inviting the viewer to identify with the figures looking beyond the frame at the infinite magnitude of nature,
Dyce’s painting can be seen to invoke Kant’s notion of the ‘mathematical sublime’ – the idea of the mind
using the power of reason to extend beyond its boundaries to think about what the imagination cannot
comprehend, in this case, time and space stretching out to infinity.23As a deeply devout High Anglican,
Dyce probably intended these figures (especially the spectator gazing at the comet) to act as guides in
eliciting feelings of wonderment in the beholder – an idea that connects with the poet and critic Samuel
Taylor Coleridge’s notion of the sublime in which individual consciousness is subsumed by a sense of the
eternal.24 On the other hand, the strange bleakness of the scene – the estrangement between figure and
setting and the fact that the bending foreground figures do not share this sense of awe – could be
interpreted in terms of doubt or a negation of the experience of the sublime in nature.
William Holman Hunt’s Our English Coasts
Holman Hunt took the quest for symbolic representation to greater extremes than Dyce. In so doing, he
connected with Coleridge’s theory that the symbol was a form of knowledge that collapsed the distinction
between subject and object. It was Hunt who aspired to make representation symbolic of eternal truths in a
way that parallels Coleridge’s idea that an object can stand as a metaphor of the ineffable. 25 The tension
between materialism and symbolism, which could be taken to signal the failure of the visual in evoking the
sublime, lies at the heart of Hunt’s project. From the time of his religious conversion when painting The
Light of the World in 1851–2 (Keble College, Oxford), the idea of truth to nature became a moral
imperative because Hunt believed that nature was the repository of transcendent truth. His reading of
Ruskin’s Modern Painters in 1847 had convinced him of the necessity of fusing moral content with realism
in his art, and he adopted Ruskin’s use of typological symbolism (reading prophecy backwards) to show it
was possible to combine realism with symbolism without distorting the former by falling back on redundant
allegorical modes. As the Illustrated London News later stated of Hunt’s work: ‘For Mr Hunt the mission of
the painter is to search the world through in the scientific spirit of the geologist or comparative anatomist in
order to present a fact of momentous importance with the utmost attainable veracity.’ 26

William Holman Hunt 1827–1910

Our English Coasts, 1852 ('Strayed Sheep') 1852
Oil on canvas
support: 432 x 584 mm; frame: 785 x 940 x 85 mm
Tate N05665
Presented by the Art Fund 1946
N05665
Fig.6

William Holman Hunt

Our English Coasts, 1852 ('Strayed Sheep') 1852

Tate N05665
Hunt’s painting Our English Coasts, 1852 (‘Strayed Sheep’) 1852 (fig.6, Tate N05665) was commissioned
by Charles Maud of Bath as a replica of the sheep in Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd 1851–2 (Manchester
City Art Gallery). It is a meticulous depiction of the view overlooking Covehurst Bay at Fairlight Glen near
Hastings in East Sussex, which the artist laboured on from mid-August to December 1852, enduring the
elements and bitter cold in the process of executing the work. The painting ostensibly addresses the
subject of coastal degradation, a phenomenon of great interest to geologists at the time for what it
disclosed about the structure and frangibility of rocks as well as the denudation or eroding mechanisms of
the sea. The geologist Charles Lyell, for example, devoted a whole section of his revised Principles of
Geology (1853) to cliff waste on the coasts of England, discovering in the external configurations of
existing land the clues as to its past and future appearance.
However, in the painting Hunt uses geological features to explore the spiritual and moral condition of the
nation, thus creating a highly ambiguous image. At first sight the painting is a seemingly credible
replication of a stretch of vulnerable coastline comprised of clay and sandstone running westwards from
Fairlight Glen through Hastings to Bexhill. The landslip in the centre of the image is shown to have been
caused by the deposition of what geologists would term ‘competent’ hard solid sandstone on ‘incompetent’
clay or on rock that is soft and easily eroded. The sheep in the foreground stumble across an outcrop of
rock, then a famous beauty spot known as the Lovers’ Seat, which was itself swept away by a huge
landslip in 1979. By attending, albeit inadvertently, to the past and future degradation of the land, Hunt
subtly imposes another layer of meaning in representing a group of unsupervised sheep grazing on
insecure rock.
The instability of the rock has been viewed as symbolic of rifts in the established Church, a response to
Ruskin’s 1851 pamphlet, Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds, in the analogy made there between
sheep lost in brambles and thickets and the established Church distracted from its mission by sectarian
disputes and vulnerable to the threat of Roman Catholicism from across the Channel. Viewed in relation to
the date in the title of the painting, the image has also been interpreted as a political satire on the hapless
state of the nation’s defences in light of the French invasion scare ignited by the ushering in of the Second
French Empire by Napoléon III in December 1852.27 Viewed symbolically, the incompetence of the rock
thus provides an apt although arcane metaphor for the artist’s pessimistic view of the nation’s moral
substance and spiritual foundations. It is significant that Hunt sets the scene late in the day, as conveyed
by the ominous lengthening shadows on the distant hill, which suggests it will not be long before the sheep
are plunged into darkness and lose their footing.
Hunt’s quest to charge the material world with sublime meaning was not easily apparent to the eye and
required verbal intervention to make clear his underlying symbolic programme, hence the inscription ‘The
Lost Sheep’ on the now lost original frame. In 1864 Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a moral interpretation of
Hunt’s painting:
Glimmer’d along the square-cut steep.
They chew’d the cud in hollows deep;
Their cheeks moved and the bones therein.
The lawless honey eaten of old
Has lost its savour and is roll’d
Into the bitterness of sin.
What would befal the godless flock
Appear’d not for the present, till
A thread of light betray’d the hill
Which with its lined and creased flank
The outgoings of the vale does block.
Death’s bones fell in with sudden clank
As wrecks of minèd embers will.28
In the poem God’s vengeance is heralded by a sudden shaft of light which illuminates the steep stone
descent and betrays the deceptive nature of the ground. Ruskin similarly came to perceive Hunt’s painting
in biblical terms, identifying it with Isaiah53:6, ‘All we like sheep have gone astray’, and so likewise
employed the written word to resublimate a work which ostensibly takes the form of a pastoral picturesque
landscape.29 The use of light as a metaphor for God’s judgement and presence is a thread that runs
through Hunt’s work and brings to mind Turner’s expression of the sublime as brilliant light in
contradistinction to Burke’s preference for darkness as the most fitting agent for revealing sublime
power.30 Whether Our English Coasts actually succeeds or not in using material phenomena as ‘proof’ of
divine providence, the painting can be seen as an attempt to forge a new scientific language for conveying
the apocalyptic sublime in deliberate disavowal of the pictorial conventions of the past.
Thomas Seddon’s Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat

Thomas Seddon 1821–1856

Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel 1854–5
Oil paint on canvas
frame: 870 x 1030 x 100 mm; support: 673 x 832 mm
Tate N00563
Presented by subscribers 1857
N00563
Fig.7

Thomas Seddon

Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel 1854–5

Tate N00563
The innovatory nature of Hunt’s project – the quest for a new visual language for the sublime that
appropriated natural science for the purpose of disclosing apocalyptic and revelatory messages – led him
in 1854 to leave Britain for the Holy Land. It was in Egypt and later in Palestine that Hunt developed a
preoccupation with millennialism and the notion that degradation serves as a prelude to divine judgement
followed by the inauguration of a new golden age. He was accompanied on his first trip by Thomas
Seddon, a pious Christian who embarked on his ambitious painting Jerusalem and the Valley of
Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel 1854–5 (fig.7, Tate N00563) soon after they arrived in
Jerusalem on 3 June 1854.
This work shares many of the visual characteristics of Our English Coasts: a similar compositional plunge
into space and a preoccupation with loose, semi-consolidated rock to convey a sense of instability as well
as symbolic meaning. Seddon’s view was from a hill to the south of the Temple Mount that encompassed
the Mount of Olives on the right and the Garden of Gethsemane, the scene of Christ’s mental agony
before the crucifixion, a choice which may have been informed by the artist’s reading of John Keble’s
popular series of poems, The Christian Year (1827). The valley of Jehoshaphat was also believed to be
the site of the Last Judgement, hence the foreground motif of the shepherd with his sheep and goats, a
reference to Christ’s figurative description of the separation of the blessed and the damned at the end of
the world.31 However, Seddon’s tranquil landscape, still in the heat of the afternoon sun, hardly gives any
indication of such an apocalyptic event. This may explain why he planned to append his Miltonic
poem Moriah to the painting in order to make apparent its underlying symbolic significance. As the scholar
George Landow has explained, Moriah, which is another name for the Temple Mount, was a sacred place
where God had appeared to men, changing their lives and religion, and where he had brought about the
events that prefigured the coming of Christ.32 The fact that Seddon contemplated resorting to verbal
exposition to enrich the imaginative and symbolic significance of the scene suggests that the visual
language of Pre-Raphaelitism risked being just a dry scientific record of external phenomena and that the
sublime significance of the scene was better evoked through verbal means. In the event, the poem was
not attached to the work, most likely because Seddon was not able to resolve it into a satisfactory final
version before his premature death in 1856.
In a speech he gave at a meeting held in the wake of Seddon’s death, Ruskin applied the term ‘historic
landscape art’ to the artist’s works praising them for their accuracy but nothing more. The following year he
spoke of two distinct types of Pre-Raphaelitism, the poetic and the prosaic – one concerned with the
imagination, the other with science – and contended that the latter was most significant for modern times
in recording monuments of the past and scenes of natural beauty threatened by forces of
modernisation.33 This view helps explain the influence Ruskin had on protégés such as J.W. Inchbold and
John Brett, artists whose devotion to Ruskin’s idea of the ‘prosaic’ presented problems for their expression
of the sublime. In a diary entry for April 1852, Brett posed himself the question, ‘which is more noble, Art or
Science?’ and went on to suggest that
Art has its foundation in mental philosophy and deals with the influences of the external world upon mind:
science deals with the external independently of mind ... science has matter abstractedly and irrespective
of its relation to man for its field and its business is to appropriate to mind – a knowledge of that by which it
is surrounded ... but Art’s business is to appropriate that knowledge to the soul of man.34
Here Brett presents science and art as two binary models for human knowledge and appears to be
sceptical of any synthesis, perhaps because he felt that if art were to capitulate to the demands of science
it risked losing its fundamental human perspective.
John Brett’s Glacier of Rosenlaui

John Brett 1831–1902

Glacier of Rosenlaui 1856
Oil paint on canvas
support: 445 x 419 mm; frame: 690 x 603 x 71 mm
Tate N05643
Purchased 1946
N05643
Fig.8

John Brett
Glacier of Rosenlaui 1856

Tate N05643
Brett’s Glacier of Rosenlaui 1856 (fig.8, Tate N05643) is on the one hand a ‘prosaic’ scientific study of
nature but on the other hand it is the first Pre-Raphaelite work of any ambition to engage with the mountain
sublime as represented by Turner and defined by Ruskin in Modern Painters.35 As a scientific survey, the
work is executed with a determination to understand how geological processes are reflected in structure
and shape: the deformed rocks of variable colour and the texture of the side of the valley reveal the way it
has been denuded by the pressure of ice, while the terminal moraine in the foreground is noticeably
different in colour and texture, indicating that these rocks have been transported from a different location
and deposited by the glacier. Yet the precise delineation of form in the foreground gives way to a Burkean
sense of obscurity in the distance relayed through ‘sad and fuscous’ colours, as if Brett were attempting to
harmonise the indefinite Turnerian with the precise Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic.36Moreover, the centrally
placed peak of the Dossenhorn, which emerges out of the distant gloom, echoes Ruskin’s observation in
the fourth volume of Modern Painters (1856) that ‘perhaps in describing mountains with any effort to give
some idea of their sublime forms, no expression comes oftener to the lips than the word “peak”’. Brett had
been inspired by reading this volume to travel to the Alps and study at close range the geological
phenomena described in Ruskin’s text. Significantly, the three main boulders in his picture are all
metamorphic types of rock belonging to the Primitive series so beloved by the author: from left to right they
are granite, gneiss and a type of metamorphic marble. These not only illustrate Ruskin’s types but also his
belief that an understanding of geological processes was as well expressed in a single rock as in a
mountain.37
Brett’s attention to the actual structural features of the rocks – their folds, lamination and deformation
indicating the flow of ice over successive epochs – shows how he was familiar with the main geological
and glacial controversies of his day. He would, for example, have been familiar with Louis Agassiz’s
influential Études sur les glaciers of 1840 and Charles Lyell’s 1853 edition of the Principles of Geology,
both of which explain the mechanics of glaciation, refuting earlier diluvial and catastrophist theories which
would have argued that the foreground boulders had been deposited by the biblical flood. As the scholar
Marjorie Hope Nicolson has explained, the theological controversies over the earth’s present form which
developed from the late seventeenth century onwards had helped to generate an interest in the natural
sublime.38 Ruskin’s writings represent an extension of this debate and in the fourth volume of Modern
Painters he frequently dwelled on the possibility that the present structures of the earth were the ruins of
what was once a greater more perfect beauty:
The present conformation of the earth appears dictated ... by supreme wisdom and kindness. And yet its
former state must have been different from what it is now; as its present one from that which it must
assume hereafter. Is this, therefore, the earth’s prime into which we are born: or is it, with all its beauty,
only the wreck of Paradise?39
The pictorial forms in Glacier of Rosenlaui appear to writhe with movement as if still in the process of
formation. Brett’s preoccupation with detail could thus be seen as a form of ‘inscape’ (to adopt Gerard
Manley Hopkins’s term), underscoring a naturalist religion that extols the enduring power of God in
shaping nature. However, the lack of any sign of human life, coupled with the frozen static quality of the
image, functions to bring these examples of ancient time into an uneasy conjunction with the present
(suggested by the more recent timescale of the glacier and temporal meteorological conditions). Here the
rocks seem to represent a time so ancient that they render useless any attempt to impose human meaning
or to suggest a directional purpose behind creation. Ruskin was later to argue that the sublime required an
imagined human presence as an emotional centre, so a spectator or other human being should be placed
within the scene. Lacking a human presence, Brett’s Glacier of Rosenlaui occludes any sense of scale,
particularly in the transitional area between the foreground ledge and the cusp of the glacier, making it
difficult to ascertain the actual scale of the boulders. While these could be regarded as protecting the
viewer from a sense of vertigo or from looking down into the abyss below the glacier, they also hover
precariously on the edge, vicariously threatening the stability of the spectator’s vantage point. 40 The effect
is to alienate the viewer from the composition, negating the experience of the sublime in the Ruskinian
sense of enhancing the beholder’s sense of moral worth, positing instead the question of nature’s
indifference to humanity.41
The resublimation of nature
The difficulties audiences experienced in extracting ideas from works like Our English Coasts and Glacier
of Rosenlaui were probably caused by the wealth of visual information provided by the artists which
frustrated the detection of any deeper meaning. Literary metaphor, by contrast, did not hinder the
expression of metaphysical insight in the same way. With the passing of Pre-Raphaelitism in the 1860s
there developed the idea that the aims of art should diverge from those of science and that the former
should be competent on its own terms. The preoccupation with the aforementioned notion of ‘affect’ in later
Victorian landscape painting is most apparent in those works which manipulate the medium to convey an
experience of immersion in nature by emphasising atmospheric and meteorological elements. In his essay
‘Modern English Landscape Painting’ of 1880, the landscape painter Alfred William Hunt argued that the
quest for truth which underpinned Pre-Raphaelitism had led to an awareness that this quality was
ultimately impossible to achieve in representation:
Our hearts are not touched: we admire the artist’s extraordinary skill, we are thoroughly grateful to him for
reminding us of what he has copied so well; but the admiration and the gratitude and the intellectual joy of
examining bit by bit such a picture, make up altogether a pleasure different in kind from that which we
derive from a great imaginative work of art.42
Turner was for Hunt the greatest imaginative painter and he was not alone in engaging with his art at this
time. Thus, in many respects landscape painting from the late 1860s can be seen as a retreat back to
Romantic notions of the natural sublime, particularly in terms of scale, facture and choice of location.
The return to the sublime aesthetic can also be seen as a response to what has broadly been described as
a crisis of faith following the spread of Darwinian theories of natural selection and evolution, together with
a growing concern about the consequences of industrialisation and urbanisation on the environment. In
keeping with Burke’s mission to find a secular language for profound human experience, the renewed
interest in the sublime could be seen as an attempt to find a new non-religious language for spiritual belief.
On the other hand, for those who retained a sense of faith the sublime represented a form of religious
experience. Either way, landscape became at this time a metaphysical realm for the projection of emotion
– a sort of liminal space that traversed fact and feeling and in which nature functioned as a reflex of the
viewing subject.
Landscapes of immersion: John Brett’s The British Channel Seen from the
Dorsetshire Cliffs and John Everett Millais’s Dew-Drenched Furze

John Brett 1831–1902

The British Channel Seen from the Dorsetshire Cliffs 1871
Oil on canvas
support: 1060 x 2127 mm; frame: 1390 x 2458 x 121 mm
Tate N01902
Presented by Mrs Brett 1902
N01902
Fig.9

John Brett

The British Channel Seen from the Dorsetshire Cliffs 1871

Tate N01902
During the 1870s John Brett furthered his mission to reconcile the demands of science and art. He forged
friendships with scientists, acquired a considerable reputation as an astronomer and became a regular
contributor to the journal Nature. Around the same time he started producing large landscapes which he
composed in his studio rather than on location, as was the case with Glacier of Rosenlaui. The British
Channel Seen from the Dorsetshire Cliffs 1871 (fig.9, Tate N01902) was the consequence of a journey
along the south coast of England with the artist’s partner Mary Ann Howcroft (who bequeathed the painting
to the nation in 1902).43 The double-square format of the picture opens up a vast panorama, illuminated in
the centre by a mysterious path of light cast on the sea by radiating sunbeams filtering through clouds.
While the vivid blue of the sea and sky could be seen to convey freedom and hope for the future, it also
suggests the feeling of release experienced by tourists on vacation. The sense of boundlessness
conveyed by the horizontal format also carries patriotic connotations, suggesting the vast reach of the
British Empire.
More significantly, perhaps, the intense blue admits a transcendental dimension lacking in
the Rosenlaui picture. The rays which spotlight the centre and push back the horizon propose the idea of
the sea as a space for contemplating the variants of existence, as in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson,
Matthew Arnold and Algernon Charles Swinburne, all of whom wrote in symbolic terms about the sea and
seashore. Brett was one of the few Pre-Raphaelite landscape artists who lost his faith; certainly, by the
time he completed this work he was an affirmed atheist. However, in confronting a void saturated with
glowing light and colour, his image evokes the sublime effects created in Baroque trompe l’oeil painting, as
if he intuitively sought to recast traditional religious modes of the sublime into a modern secular language.
This approach could be described as a post-religious condition of emotional transcendence, aimed at
eliciting a sense of exaltation and release rather than fear or anxiety.
Sir John Everett Millais, Bt 1829–1896
Dew-Drenched Furze 1889–90
Oil paint on canvas
support: 1732 x 1230 x 27 mm
Tate T12865
Presented by Geoffroy Millais in memory of his late father, Sir Ralph Millais Bt 2009
T12865
Fig.10

Sir John Everett Millais, Bt

Dew-Drenched Furze 1889–90

Tate T12865
A similar sense of immersion pervades John Everett Millais’s Dew-Drenched Furze 1889–90 (fig.10,
Tate T12865). Millais’s view of nature was more traditionally pantheistic than Brett’s, as his son J.G. Millais
recalled: ‘To him all Nature was but “the garment of the living God”. Its poetry was ever present to his
mind.’44 In the painting the sun streams through a clearing of bedewed gorse in the early morning haze in
a wood on the Murthly Estate in Perthshire. While the vaporous atmosphere, conveyed by pigment laid on
with a dry brush, can be seen to emulate Constable’s flecked or ‘snow’ effects, the obliteration of form by
the rising sun recalls the Turnerian sublime. The format of Millais’s painting not only evokes the Romantic
landscapes of Constable and Turner, but the idea of nature as a metaphor for feeling is further suggested
by the allusion to a line from Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) in the title:
Calm and deep peace on this high wold,
And on these dews that drench the furze,
And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold.45
Seen in relation to the verse, the filigree patterns of dew-drops across the surface quicken the viewer’s
apprehension of perceiving something extraordinary in what could otherwise be taken as a nondescript
patch of nature. Moreover, the imagery of both painting and poem can be seen to echo Tennyson’s
metaphor of a veil hiding the divine mystery of nature, expressed elsewhere in the poem, ‘thy voice to
soothe and bless ... Behind the veil, behind the veil’, thereby admitting a sense of the numinous or of
nature as sacred mystery.46 The lack of human presence within the picture paradoxically heightens the
role of the spectator in beholding the scene. The central vista framed by large trees on the edges allows
the eye to wander across the enticing, but in reality threatening, mass of sharp gorse towards the light
penetrating the wood in the distance. Millais’s abstract evocation of the suffusing energy of the sun, made
all the more poignant through the reference to In Memoriam, has the effect of increasing the spectator’s
sense of being, or what Ruskin would term moral worth, one of his key tenets of the sublime.
William Holman Hunt’s The Triumph of the Innocents
While it is possible to contend that the resublimation of nature seen in the landscapes of Brett and Millais
was aimed at conveying experiences of self-transcendence that lifted the beholder beyond forms of
understanding invited by earlier Pre-Raphaelite conventions, the rhetoric of the apocalyptic sublime could
still appeal to those for whom the language of the biblical sublime continued to carry meaning. Holman
Hunt was one such artist who, in the work he produced in Palestine, strove to place natural phenomena in
a wider eschatological framework. It was during the time he spent in the Holy Land that he assumed the
mantle of a prophet, discovering in the stony arid landscape messages pertaining to the promise of
millennial judgement and revelation. For Hunt, scientific study was the gateway to religious insight and he
was critical of Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus, 1863) – a biography of the historical figure
of Jesus that rejected the belief that he was the son of God and could perform miracles – for its ‘lack of
imagination concerning the profundity and sublimity of the mind and purpose of Jesus’. 47 While Hunt
aspired to join the real and the visionary in his work, he explicitly rejected Baroque conventions of fusing
the natural and supernatural through effects such as billowing clouds and radiant shafts of light. However,
he was interested in employing light and dark to establish the actual and metaphysical significance of a
religious scene. He manipulated these qualities to communicate the polarities of religious epiphany and
doubt, and delved further in exploring the properties of supernatural or what he termed ‘psychedelic’ colour
to express spiritualism and the otherworldly.

William Holman Hunt 1827–1910

The Triumph of the Innocents 1883–4
Oil paint on canvas
support: 1562 x 2540 mm; frame: 2208 x 3175 x 125 mm
Tate N03334
Presented by Sir John Middlemore Bt 1918
N03334
Fig.11

William Holman Hunt

The Triumph of the Innocents 1883–4

Tate N03334
Light is a key theme in The Triumph of the Innocents, the artist’s major project from the 1870s which exists
in two main versions – the first, started in 1876 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), and the replica,
commenced in 1883 (fig.11, Tate N03334).48 The painting represents Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus
on the road to Gaza as they flee Bethlehem at night to seek sanctuary in Egypt. They are accompanied by
spirits of the infants slaughtered by King Herod, bearing signs of their suffering and martyrdom as they
awaken to a new spiritual existence. It is to their luminous presence that the Christ child attempts to draw
his mother’s attention. Two types of light illuminate the scene: the natural moonlight that reveals the
landscape in the distance and the supernatural light that irisates both the Innocents and the ectoplasmic
spheres upon which they glide. Hunt described these bubbles as ‘magnified globes’ that encapsulate the
sacred significance of the scene and ‘image the Jewish belief in the Millennium’.49
The visionary realism of the picture (the appearance of transcendent beings in a temporal setting) can be
described as ‘numinous’ in more overtly spiritual terms than Millais’s Dew-Drenched Furze, discussed
above. This word was first coined by Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy (1917), a text that posited the
numinous as an idea of mystery and otherness that connected with the sublime. Although Otto was careful
to distinguish the numinous from the sublime, defining the former as a type of religious experience, he
nevertheless felt they were connected in that neither could be explicated and both were mysterious and
intensely compelling for the beholder.50
The viewer is invited to partake of the numinous by sharing the Christ child’s encounter with the
supernatural spectacle of the resurrected infants, Christ being a figure who traverses the boundaries of
time and eternity. On the other hand, the spectator is also given reason to doubt their real presence by
identifying with Mary, dimly prescient of their existence, and Joseph, who is altogether unaware of them,
absorbed as he is in the task of ensuring his family’s safety. The effect of awe generated by the image
thus relates to the audience’s inability to decide in which realm the event takes place – the real or
imagined – resulting in a strangeness of vision that accords with Ruskin’s notion of the grotesque as a
concept that offered a partial glimpse of the sublime. For Ruskin, the grotesque involved the play of the
imagination to produce a perception of the sublime in the beholder. He therefore divorced the grotesque
from its connection with the satanic and immoral to show that it was capable of enhancing the imaginative
and moral faculties of the beholder:
The grotesque which comes to all men in a disturbed dream is the intelligible example of this kind but also
the most ignoble; The imagination, in this instance, being entirely deprived of all aid from reason, and
incapable of self-government. I believe, however, that the noblest forms of imaginative power are also in
some sort ungovernable, and have in them something of the character of dreams; so that the vision, of
whatever kind, comes uncalled, and will not submit itself to the seer, but conquers him, and forces him to
speak as a prophet, having no power over his words or thoughts. 51
For Ruskin, The Triumph of the Innocents was the most important work of Hunt’s career and ‘the greatest
religious painting of our time’, maybe because it exemplified the grotesque as expressed in the above
passage.52 Relevant to this interpretation are the problems Hunt encountered when working on the first
version. He had to contend not only with the threat of typhoid fever but also with the anxiety caused by the
dangerous political situation in Jerusalem following Russia’s declaration of war against Turkey in 1877,
which led him to evacuate his family to Jaffa to escape what he feared would be a massacre of Christians
in the area. Back in London he experienced technical problems and having had the linen support backed
with canvas he found the centre of the picture beginning to twist. This made him suspect that demonic
interference was preventing the work’s completion, causing him to temporarily abandon the painting and
commence the second Tate version. Hunt’s problems culminated in an extraordinary psychic encounter
with the devil when working on the painting at his studio in London on Christmas day 1879, as he
explained in a letter to his friend William Bell Scott:
I hung back to look at my picture. I felt assured that I should succeed. I said to myself half aloud, ‘I think I
have beaten the devil!’ and stepped down, when the whole building shook with a convulsion, seemingly
immediately behind the easel, as if a great creature were shaking itself and running between me and the
door ... I noticed that there was no sign of human or other creature about. I went back to my own work
really rather cheered by the grotesque suggestion that came into my mind that the commotion was the evil
one departing.53
The Triumph of the Innocents took on a sublime dimension for Hunt, introducing him to experiences of
transcendence, terror and the uncanny. How far this experience transfers to the viewer depends on our
ability to engage with the work on an aesthetic and psychological level, a challenge for audiences living in
a secularised and religiously sceptical culture.
George Frederic Watts and the abstract sublime
Ruskin also championed the art of George Frederic Watts in his later years, claiming that Watts, like Hunt,
maintained an ethical role for art in using the visual to express the fear and mystery of the unknown. Of all
the painters discussed in this essay, the art of Watts comes closest to the Romantic sublime of Turner as
his works encompass subjects relating to the apocalyptic, biblical and Miltonic sublime. In contrast to
Hunt’s religious art, which was grounded in typological exegesis, Watts saw himself as a deist, one who
felt the immanence of a higher presence without subscribing to any particular doctrine.
Watts was interested in expressing absolutes and a key strand in his thinking was that life was conducted
through impersonal motive forces, a notion he probably adapted from Darwin via the writings of the widely
read thinker and journalist Herbert Spencer. It was Spencer who coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’,
famously adopted by Darwin in the later editions of Origin of Species to define the operation of natural
selection. Watts also appropriated this phase, on one occasion defining this struggle as a ‘law of combat’
through which individuals, groups and nations fight to realise individual identity. 54 Watts comes close to
Spencer and Darwin in imagining the universe held together by a compound of conflicting forces, and in
maintaining that it was only through a process of struggle that it could evolve into a higher synthesis of
matter and spirit. Given his belief in vitalism – that there is a mysterious vital force in organisms that cannot
be explained by science – it is hardly surprising that Watts was wary of giving precise form to that which he
felt could not be fully defined, instead developing a visual language that comprised webs of dense colour
to simultaneously monumentalise and dissolve form. Likewise, in his written thoughts Watts avoided the
particular in favour of grand statements about existence and creation as if he were attempting to
harmonise the visual and verbal in evoking the sublime:
In the grandeur and universality of astronomical phenomena we forget the insignificant. Life in all its forms,
in all its restlessness, in all its pageantry, disappears in the magnitude and remoteness of the perspective.
The mind sees only the gorgeous fabric of the universe, recognises only the divine architect, and ponders
but on cycles of glory or of desolation. If the pride of man is ever to be mocked, or his vanity mortified, or
his selfishness rebuked, it is under the influence of these sublime studies.55

George Frederic Watts 1817–1904

Chaos c.1875–82
Oil paint on canvas
support: 1067 x 3048 mm; frame: 1395 x 3375 x 90 mm
Tate N01647
Presented by George Frederic Watts 1897
N01647
Fig.12

George Frederic Watts

Chaos c.1875–82

Tate N01647
The cosmos is the theme of Chaos c.1875–82 (fig.12, Tate N01647), a work conceived around 1848 when
the artist planned the picture as the key to a series of murals representing the progress of the universe and
the history of the world. The Tate painting is the most resolved of several versions of the composition for
which Watts invented his own allegorical language. The left side equates the origins of humanity with the
eruption of uncontrollable energies, as bodily forms struggle to release themselves from fiery elements. In
the middle surging waves cover mountain peaks, while in the foreground a single figure rises from the
watery mass marking ‘the beginning of the strides of time’. To the right the sea gives way to an elevated
plateau upon which rest colossal giants with a chain of flying female figures showing the now ‘continuous
stream of time’.56 Highly imaginative and partly drawn from literary sources such as
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Chaos also engages with notions of deep time that marked the geological
controversies of the 1830s to 1850s, preparing the way for Darwin and undermining the literal acceptance
of Genesis. The painting embraces the theories of both the Catastrophist school, which argued that there
had been a series of disasters that changed the entire landscape of the world and annihilated species, and
Charles Lyell’s Uniformitarian idea that the earth’s crust was shaped over long periods of time by natural
processes still operational today. As a synthesis of different theories, Chaos poses the ethical question: is
the history of the world one of continual forward progress, or does civilisation at its climax turn against
itself and implode?
The principles of vitalism and evolution that Watts conveys in Chaos – expressing surges of volcanic
energy giving way to consolidated matter using heavy gestural brushwork – finds a parallel in his written
ideas on the progress of civilisation. He set these down in his numerous statements on art, particularly in
his essay ‘Our Race as Pioneers’:
Civilisation is like a flood, a mighty over-whelming flood, not so much caused by storms, or even the
onwards rolling of the great ocean, but by the welling up of the mighty mass of waters from beneath,
forcing its way over the earth, steadily and perceptibly rising; and unless outlets be found and channels
created (whereby it may be made beneficial and irrigatory), it will submerge much that is fair and worthy of
permanence.57
The ambitious reach of Watts’s vision in both his visual and verbal works invites comparison with the
writings of another absolutist of the age, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, especially the idea of a
‘dynamic primal unity’ beyond all phenomena which it was art’s purpose to disclose through symbolic form,
set out in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872, revised 1886).58 Like the philosopher, Watts believed
that art had a sublime purpose as it aimed at transforming consciousness in the viewer, encouraging an
awareness of existence that transcended individuation. From a Nietzschean and Wattsian perspective,
wars and natural disasters were sublime rather than merely horrible as through the symbolic medium of art
they bestowed grandeur on existence and gave it meaning.
Watts also comes close to Ruskin’s concept of the grotesque in seeking a prophetic role for the artist and
in employing paint as a ‘veil’ to offer a partial glimpse of the unknown. Moreover, by using abstract
elements to communicate spiritual aspirations Watts can further be seen as an artist who used symbolism
to understand areas of human existence that reside beyond the logic of science. In this sense his work
connects with the art of other symbolists such as Edward Burne-Jones, as well as painters interested in
fathoming the darker, irrational side of the human psyche, such as Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau.
Watts’s abstraction can further be seen as a launching pad for sublime abstraction in the twentieth century.
The dense patterns of centrifugal energy that characterise Chaos not only echo the Turnerian sublime but
pave the way for the apocalyptic proto-abstract landscapes of Wassily Kandinsky. Many of the themes
provoked by the post-Darwinian sublime, especially the idea that the modern is as much about the
unleashing of unknown terrifying forces as it is about the mastery of the environment, help explain why the
sublime continued to be compelling in the twentieth century and remains relevant today.
Notes
1
See Elizabeth Prettejohn, Beauty and Art: 1750–2000, Oxford 2005 and Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in
Victorian Painting, New Haven and London 2007.
2
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. by
A. Phillips, Oxford 1990, pp.36–7.
3
See Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime, exhibition catalogue, British Museum, London 1980.
4
See The Oxford Companion to J.M.W. Turner, ed. by Evelyn Joll, Martin Butlin and Luke Herrmann,
Oxford 2001, pp.26, 259.
5
Burke 1990, pp.57–8.
6
John Ruskin, ‘Modern Painters’, in E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), The Works of John
Ruskin, London and New York 1903–12, vol.3, p.572.
7
Ibid., p.128.
8
George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin, Princeton, New Jersey 1971,
pp.203–4.
9
John Ruskin, letter to Susan Beever, 21 January 1875, quoted in Leslie Parris, Landscape in Britain,
c.1750–1850, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1973, p.133.
10
For a detailed examination of the relationship between the sublime and the grotesque in Ruskin’s work,
see Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1982, pp.111–
38. A key source for the identification of the grotesque with spiritual insight was Victor Hugo’s Preface to
Cromwell of 1827.
11
For the most detailed analyses of Ruskin and the sublime, see Helsinger 1982 and Landow 1971.
12
Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime, New Haven 1986.
13
Ruskin in Cook and Wedderburn 1903–12, vol.35, p.601, note.
14
George Eliot, Adam Bede, introd. by F.R. Leavis, New York and Toronto 1961, pp.176–7.
15
William Holman Hunt, letter to John Lucas Tupper, 11 March 1879, in James H. Coombs, Anne S. Scott,
George P. Landow and Arnold A. Saunders (eds.), A Pre-Raphaelite Friendship: The Correspondence of
William Holman Hunt and John Lucas Tupper, Ann Arbor, Michigan 1986, p.236. Shelley was awarded two
stars by the original Brotherhood in their ‘List of Immortals’; see William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism
and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, London 1913, vol.2, p.111.
16
William Holman Hunt, letter to John Lucas Tupper, 21 April 1897, in Coombs, Scott, Landow and
Saunders 1986, pp.275–6.
17
See http://www.preraphaelites.org/the-collection/1916p25/an-english-autumn-afternoon-1852-1853/,
accessed 13 September 2012.
18
Ford Madox Brown, diary entry, 13 July 1855, in Virginia Surtees (ed.), The Diary of Ford Madox Brown,
New Haven and London 1981, p.144.
19
Alastair Ian Wright, ‘Suburban Prospects: Vision and Possession in Ford Madox Brown’s An English
Autumn Afternoon’, in Margaretta Frederick Watson (ed.), Collecting the Pre-Raphaelites: The Anglo-
American Enchantment, Aldershot 1997, pp.192–3.
20
Professor Ansted, ‘Science and Art V: On the General Relation of Physical Geography and Geology to the
Progress of Landscape Art in Various Countries’, Art Journal, December 1863, p.235.
21
Anon., ‘The Royal Academy Exhibition’, Illustrated London News, 12 May 1860, p.458.
22
Donati’s comet was seen in Britain in the autumn of 1858, the last time it would be seen for another 21,000
years according to the Illustrated London News. See Marcia Pointon, ‘The Representation of Time in
Painting: A Study of William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay: A Recollection of October 5th 1858’, Art History, March
1978, pp.99–103.
23
Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England, New York
1960, pp.6–9.
24
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Writings, ed. by David Vallins, Houndmills, Basingstoke 2003, vol.5,
p.87.
25
See Philip Shaw, The Sublime, London 2006, p.94.
26
Illustrated London News, 6 December 1873, p.543.
27
Ruskin in Cook and Wedderburn 1903–12, vol.7, p.534; Jonathan P. Ribner, ‘Our English Coasts, 1852:
William Holman Hunt and Invasion Fear at Midcentury’, Art Journal, vol.55, no.2, Summer 1996, pp.45–54.
28
This untitled poem was written when Hopkins was intensely interested in the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic.
See R.K.R. Thornton (ed.), All My Eyes See: The Visual World of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Newcastle
1975, pp.92–3.
29
Ruskin in Cook and Wedderburn 1903–12, vol.33, p.274.
30
Burke 1990, p.73.
31
Matthew 25:31–2; see Nicholas Tromans (ed.), The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painters, exhibition
catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2008, pp.166–7.
32
George P. Landow, ‘Thomas Seddon’s Moriah’, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies,
vol.1, 1987, pp.59–65, http://victorianweb.org/painting/seddon/moriah.html, accessed 20 June 2011.
33
Ruskin in Cook and Wedderburn 1903–12, vol.14, pp.465, 464–70.
34
John Brett, diary entry, 23 April 1852, in Charles Brett (ed.), John Brett, Diary 1851–1860, unpublished
manuscript, 2002, p.12.
35
See, for example, Ruskin’s Turnerian watercolour, The Glacier des Bois c.1843–4 (Ruskin Art Foundation),
reproduced in Cook and Wedderburn 1903–12, vol.2, opposite p.225.
36
Burke 1990, p.75.
37
Ruskin in Cook and Wedderburn 1903–12, vol.6, p.222 and chapters 8–11.
38
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetic of the
Infinite, Washington 1959. For a full discussion about Diluvial theory, see Rebecca Bedell, ‘The History of
the Earth: Darwin’s Geology and Landscape Art’, in Diana Donald and Jane Munro (eds.), Endless Forms:
Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, New Haven and London 2009, pp.52–7.
39
Ruskin in Cook and Wedderburn 1903–12, vol.6, p.177.
40
See Christiana Payne, John Brett: Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter, New Haven and London 2010, p.32.
41
Landow 1971, pp.208–9. Ruskin’s negative praise of Brett’s Val d’Aosta 1858 (Andrew Lloyd Webber
Collection) – ‘I never saw the mirror so held up to Nature; but it is Mirror’s work not Man’s’ – further
suggests that this type of landscape does not allow for overwhelming aesthetic experience. Ruskin in Cook
and Wedderburn 1903–12, vol.14, p.234.
42
Alfred William Hunt, ‘Modern English Landscape Painting’, Nineteenth Century, vol.7, May 1880, p.785.
43
Payne 2010, pp.107–9.
44
John Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, London 1899, vol.2, p.73.
45
Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., London 1850, canto
XI, http://www.archive.org/stream/inmemoriam00tennrich#page/16/mode/2up, accessed 23 June 2011.
46
Ibid., canto LV, http://www.archive.org/stream/inmemoriam00tennrich#page/80/mode/2up, accessed 23
June 2011.
47
Holman Hunt 1913, vol.2, p.338.
48
Dates for the Walker version are: 1876–8, 1879–83, 1885, 1887, retouched 1890; those for the Tate
replica are: 1883–5, retouched 1887, 1889, 1890, 1897. There also exists the first and smaller version in
the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, painted 1870, 1876, 1884, 1903. See Judith
Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London 2006, vol.1, pp.238–
41, 256–8, 223–4.
49
Reprinted in Holman Hunt 1913, vol.2, p.417.
50
First published in Germany in 1917 as Das Heilige – Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und
sein verhältnis zum Rationalen (The Holy – On the Irrational in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to
the Rational). English translation 1923.
51
See George P. Landow, ‘The Triumph of the Innocents’, Replete with Meaning: William Holman Hunt and
Typological Symbolism, New Haven and London
1979, http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/whh/replete/triumph.html, accessed 20 August 2009; Ruskin in
Cook and Wedderburn 1903–12, vol.11, p.178. For a searching discussion of the Ruskinian grotesque,
see Lucy Hartley, ‘“Griffinism, grace and all”: The Riddle of the Grotesque in John Ruskin’s Modern
Painters’, in Colin Trodd, Paul Barlow and David Amigoni (eds.), Victorian Culture and the Idea of the
Grotesque, Aldershot 1999, pp.81–94.
52
Ruskin, ‘The Art of England’, in Cook and Wedderburn 1903–12, vol.33, p.277.
53
William Holman Hunt, letter to William Bell Scott, 5 January 1880, in William Bell Scott, Autobiographical
Notes, and Notices of his Artistic and Poetic Circle of Friends, 1830–1882, ed. by William Minto, London
1892, vol.2, pp.230–1. In a letter to Hunt about the painting of February 1880 Ruskin wrote, ‘I hope the
Adversity may be looked on as really Diabolic and finally conquerable utterly’, as if acknowledging the
substance of the artist’s vision. Quoted in Robert Hewison, Ian Warrell and Stephen Wildman, Ruskin,
Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2000, p.275.
54
W.T. Stead, ‘Character Sketch’, Review of Reviews, June 1902, pp.567–77.
55
George Frederic Watts, ‘Thoughts on Life’, in Mary S. Watts, George Frederic Watts, London 1912, vol.3,
pp.295–6.
56
Watts’s 1884 description of Chaos is reproduced in Emilie Isabel Barrington, G.F. Watts: Reminiscences,
London 1905, pp.131–3.
57
George Frederic Watts, ‘Our Race as Pioneers’, reprinted in M.S. Watts 1912, vol.3, pp.280–1.
58
Friederich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. by Walter Kauffmann, New York 1968, pp.2, 16. I am
grateful to Victor Heyfron for this reference.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the two anonymous readers of the first draft of this essay for their comments.
Alison Smith is Curator (Head of British Art to 1900), Tate Britain.

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How to cite
Alison Smith, ‘The Sublime in Crisis: Landscape Painting after Turner’, in Nigel
Llewellyn and Christine Riding (eds.), The Art of the Sublime, Tate Research
Publication, January 2013, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-
sublime/alison-smith-the-sublime-in-crisis-landscape-painting-after-turner-
r1109220, accessed 05 June 2017.