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Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd
George Romney
The Wave
Oil on canvas
c. 1793
33 x 48 ½ inches; 840 x 1235 mm
description
The present, remarkable painting belongs to an exceptional group of subject paintings Romney made in the last decade of his life. These include The Tempest: Shipwreck Scene, Act I painted for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and subsequently destroyed, Boys in a Boat Drifting out to Sea in a private collection and Shipwreck at the Cape of Good Hope which was engraved by William Blake for Hayley’s The Life of George Romney. In each Romney explores the fragility of his human subjects in the face of the power of the sea. The last of these, based on an episode reported by the Swedish naturalist C.P. Thunberg, shows a contemporary wreck, foreshadowing the more famous paintings of maritime disasters in the early nineteenth century.
In the visionary conception of history painting that germinated in his mind throughout the decade, Romney contrasted the ‘artificial and cold macanical effect’ of academic historical compositions of the day, created in piecemeal fashion, with his own notion of a painting:
‘heated and fermented long in the mind and varied every possible way to make the whole perfect that the whole composition may come from the mind like one sudden impression or conception.’
As Alex Kidson has observed the ‘other-worldly atmosphere’ in the present work does ‘indeed bear every sign of having been ‘heated and fermented long’ in a mind not unduly exercised by the expectations of his contemporaries.’ As with Boys in a Boat Drifting out to Sea there is no obvious literary source, and it may be that Romney took his idea from a human-interest story in a newspaper. Tsunamis were not unknown in the eighteenth century, in 1783 a series of large earthquakes in Calabria triggered a rockslide near Scilla causing a tsunami which killed 1,500 seeking refuge on a nearby beach. Sir William Hamilton provided an account of the earthquake – and fatal wave - from Count Francesco Ippolito to the Royal Society which was published in their Philosophical Transactions in 1783.
The painting itself is an unsettling meditation on mortality. The children – painted in the spirited, impish style of Titania’s attendants from Romney’s suite of paintings showing scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream – are apparently carefree and completely unaware of their impending doom. In the preparatory drawing at Yale, two of the children seem to have an awareness of the danger at hand, in the finished painting Romney reverts the figures to a state of innocence. Romney was clearly interested in eliciting a frisson from his viewer, showing us the dark wall of water a moment before impact. Romney creates an image that reaches beyond the terms of the sublime as articulated by Burke to something even more dreadful, the violent loss of innocents.
As Alex Kidson noted in 2002 ‘there is a serious case to be made, at least from the perspective of the twenty-first century, that Romney’s true originality lay in the creation of extraordinary images such as this.’ Romney saw an inherent fragility in human existence and in spare, abstracted images such as this he captured something of the temporary reality of the Anthropocene in the face of nature.
In the visionary conception of history painting that germinated in his mind throughout the decade, Romney contrasted the ‘artificial and cold macanical effect’ of academic historical compositions of the day, created in piecemeal fashion, with his own notion of a painting:
‘heated and fermented long in the mind and varied every possible way to make the whole perfect that the whole composition may come from the mind like one sudden impression or conception.’
As Alex Kidson has observed the ‘other-worldly atmosphere’ in the present work does ‘indeed bear every sign of having been ‘heated and fermented long’ in a mind not unduly exercised by the expectations of his contemporaries.’ As with Boys in a Boat Drifting out to Sea there is no obvious literary source, and it may be that Romney took his idea from a human-interest story in a newspaper. Tsunamis were not unknown in the eighteenth century, in 1783 a series of large earthquakes in Calabria triggered a rockslide near Scilla causing a tsunami which killed 1,500 seeking refuge on a nearby beach. Sir William Hamilton provided an account of the earthquake – and fatal wave - from Count Francesco Ippolito to the Royal Society which was published in their Philosophical Transactions in 1783.
The painting itself is an unsettling meditation on mortality. The children – painted in the spirited, impish style of Titania’s attendants from Romney’s suite of paintings showing scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream – are apparently carefree and completely unaware of their impending doom. In the preparatory drawing at Yale, two of the children seem to have an awareness of the danger at hand, in the finished painting Romney reverts the figures to a state of innocence. Romney was clearly interested in eliciting a frisson from his viewer, showing us the dark wall of water a moment before impact. Romney creates an image that reaches beyond the terms of the sublime as articulated by Burke to something even more dreadful, the violent loss of innocents.
As Alex Kidson noted in 2002 ‘there is a serious case to be made, at least from the perspective of the twenty-first century, that Romney’s true originality lay in the creation of extraordinary images such as this.’ Romney saw an inherent fragility in human existence and in spare, abstracted images such as this he captured something of the temporary reality of the Anthropocene in the face of nature.
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