snowstorm: steam-boat

One of the many fun things about Making Light has been the opportunity to discuss some of the art that I enjoy. So far, we’ve looked at The Skating Minister, the Evening Star, and Trees in Winter, and for our current coastal theme, I thought I’d try to write about my favourite painting of the winter sea: J M W Turner’s Snow Storm: Steam-boat.

What do we see when we look at this painting? Carried inward by the swirling motion of Turner’s energetic brushstrokes, our eyes are drawn to the distressed paddle steamer with its plume of coal-black smoke, struggling vainly against the winter storm, its mast and paddle-wheel illuminated by the bright, white columns of the distress flares it is repeatedly sending up. Caught in a vortex of swirling cloud and churning water, the vessel pitches and reels in a place of pure turbulence, where the horizon has ceased to exist, where air and sea have become one.

The vessel struggling in this winter storm is a packet steamer – a ferry carrying human passengers – of an early nineteenth-century type that Turner knew very well indeed . . .

. . . routinely travelled about on . . .

. . . and was frequently drawn to, as a subject. In Turner’s numerous sketchbooks, as well as his finished paintings, steam packets are a shorthand for modern industrial humanity, with its new coal fires and steam power, its perpetual motion of goods and people, its tickets and its tours.

Turner’s steam packets are often seen stolidly puffing away in stormy seas . . .

. . . faring forward, in foul weather . . .

. . . always pitted and positioned against extraordinary elemental forms and forces which throw their – and, by extension, modern humanity’s – temporal, ephemeral nature into relief.

In Turner’s late work particularly, steam vessels appear as figures of doggedness and resolution, chugging forwards, ever onwards into a modern industrial future, like the tenacious tug which drags the ghost ship of Britain’s empire towards its inevitable sunset in The Fighting Temeraire.

But can there be any sort of future – modern, industrial, otherwise – for the vessel that is caught in up in this particular winter maelstrom?

Often, in Turner’s sea pictures, the raw energy of the raging storm subsumes the struggling ship as the focus of our attention . . .

. . . and, with Snow Storm: Steam-boat particularly, the more we look, the more swept up we become in the unstoppable vitality of the extraordinary forces it depicts. If this painting is about anything, surely it is that energy, that vitality?

Is Snow Storm: Steam-boat, then, as William Hazlitt wrote about the response to Turner’s late work a “picture of nothing, and very like”? Can this work exhibited back in 1842, possibly be pure aesthetic expression, pure abstraction, as many later claimed, avant la lettre? But as if to prevent us from swirling into our own post-modern vortex, Snow Storm: Steam-boat insists on telling us what it is about at a level of detail that, even for the late Turner (whose exhibited paintings abounded with lengthy descriptive titles) seems excessive: Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm the Night the “Ariel” left Harwich. Reading this, I think of Turner winking at us while laying out his basket of referential red herrings for critics to pick over in perpetuity. Was there ever such a vessel? Such a storm? Could JMW himself – bravely strapped to the mast in the service of capturing on canvas what a winter tempest really looks and feels like – actually have been there? I honestly don’t think that any of this – neither the “reality” of the incident or the ship, nor Turner’s jocular self-mythologising as Ulysses – really matters.

When I look at Snow Storm: Steam-boat I see a creative response to humanity’s fleeting condition, to all things permanent and ephemeral, and especially to the two things of that nature that continually inspired Turner: the sea, and the light upon it.

And for reasons I can’t quite articulate or put my finger on, I also find this painting extraordinarily moving and even comforting at this particular turbulent moment: a moment in which a weird, autocratic maelstrom seems to have engulfed the world. Art definitely has a way of putting things in perspective. Is there a painting or another artwork that does something similar for you? Do tell me about it.