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Claude-Joseph Vernet (painter) French, 1714 - 1789 The Shipwreck, 1772 oil on canvas Overall: 113.5 x 162.9 cm (44 11/16 x 64 1/8 in.) framed: 124.8 x 172.9 x 7.6 cm (49 1/8 x 68 1/16 x 3 in.) Patrons' Permanent Fund and Chester Dale Fund 2000.22.1 Not on View |
Claude-Joseph Vernet was one of the most famous landscape and marine painters in Europe during the second half of the eighteenth century. After his initial schooling in his native Avignon and in Aix-en-Provence, the twenty-year-old artist traveled to Rome in 1734. He studied there for a brief time with the French-born marine painter Adrien Manglard, but quickly established his own reputation. Vernet made sketching trips in and around Rome and along the Mediterranean coast as far south as Naples, capturing scenes that provided the basic repertoire of his art for the rest of his long career. He was soon sought after by Roman collectors, as well as by the international community of French diplomats in Italy and the many wealthy travelers from north of the Alps, especially the British making their Grand Tour. For these patrons Vernet painted views of Rome and Naples, and imaginary landscapes and coastal scenes that evoke, rather than describe, an idyllic Italian countryside and coastline. He usually painted landscapes in pairs or even in sets of four in order to depict nature in a variety of forms and weather effects. In 1750 Vernet was summoned back to France, where he returned in 1753 and began to paint a series of monumental views of the principal seaports of the realm, on commission from Louis XV. However, Vernet continued to paint landscapes and marine scenes for an international clientele, enjoying critical and commercial success until his death on the eve of the French Revolution.
The Shipwreck epitomizes the type of marine subject for which Vernet was best known. It was commissioned, with a pendant Mediterranean Coast by Moonlight (location unknown since c. 1955), by Lord Arundell in November 1771. The Shipwreck formed a dramatic contrast with the peaceful moonlit coast scene, illustrating respectively the "Sublime" (eliciting a sensation of horror in the spectator) and the "Beautiful" (an agreeable and reposeful sensation), concepts that were much discussed in aesthetic discourse of the day. A ship flying a Dutch flag has foundered on a rocky seashore during a dramatic storm. Wind crashes the waves, bends a tree to breaking point, and sends clouds scudding across the sky, while a red zigzag crack of lightning illuminates a harbor town farther along the coast. Survivors from the wreck are distraught, exhausted, or just grateful to have clambered ashore. As the ship takes a final lurch against the rocks, desperate survivors slide down a rope in an attempt to gain the land. Such dramatic narrative incidents along the shores of Vernet's shipwrecks were greatly admired by his public and his critics, and spectators responded with genuine emotion to his depiction of the plight of man in the face of an unrelenting nature. Shipwrecks were a real hazard of travel in the eighteenth century, much like the automobile or airplane crashes of our own time. Vernet painted the scene with lively brushwork, corresponding to the various effects of clouds, waves, and foam, for example; his figures, however, were carefully and precisely rendered.
(Text by Philip Conisbee, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation, 2000)