Storm & Sublime

The eighteenth century gave us a name for the pleasure we take in vastness and danger seen from safety: the sublime. Edmund Burke argued that terror, at one remove, is a source of the strongest feeling art can produce, and the painters of storm and sea set out to prove him right. A ship is swallowed by a wave; a sky boils; a tiny human figure measures the scale of a force that does not notice it. Turner is the great instance — he is said to have had himself lashed to a mast to feel the gale he then painted — but the sublime runs through Vernet's shipwrecks and the towering cloud-fronts of the Romantics. The technique is one of contrast between the immense and the minute: the painter gives you something small and human precisely so the vastness has a measure. Look for that figure. It is your stand-in, and its helplessness is the whole point of the picture's awe.

Curatorial note by Alexander Knigge, Editor, Artifact World Gallery