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拍品专文
With each swift brushstroke of this tempestuous scene, Bonington pulls both viewer and foundering vessel down into an inexorable vortex of raging water. Such an image is the culmination of all that the previous century had gifted artists in the form of the sublime. As Edmund Burke so eloquently defined it, ‘whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger…is a source of the sublime…When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and [yet] with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful’ (A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, London, p. 34). And Bonington undeniably delights; his bravura execution turns paint into a symphony of crashing waves and driving rain, in which the boat is eternally suspended just before the point of destruction.
This type of scene is a far cry from the gentle views of golden sunshine reflected in pools on the shore that are most immediately recognisable as the artist's work. Patrick Noon suggests the reason for this is that the painting relates to a specific commission that Bonington received around 1827 to illustrate a French edition of Captain George William Manby’s treatise on the Manby Mortar, an apparatus he had invented in 1807 for rescuing people from coastal shipwreck (op. cit., p. 73). To this end, Bonington produced a lithograph after a sketch by Manby that shows a group of gentlemen firing the mortar out to a ship in distress. The inspiration for the lithograph appears to be closely rooted in Dutch painting of the seventeenth century, which Bonington had assiduously studied in the Louvre. However, the present painting demonstrates a much greater creative freedom, and likely takes as its point of departure Thomas Lupton’s mezzotint after J.M.W. Turner’s drawing of the Eddystone Lighthouse, a copy of which Bonington had acquired on his trip to London in 1825 (fig. 1; see Noon, ibid.). In both compositions, all the movement swirls around a central point of light in the darkness of the storm. In the case of Bonington’s painting, this is not a lighthouse but the red flare shot from Fort Rouge, a temporary defensive structure constructed off Calais during the Napoleonic Wars.
A further comparison can be made looking forward to Turner’s painting of 1831, Lifeboat and Manby Apparatus Going Off to a Stranded Vessel (fig. 2; London, Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. no. FA.211). It is very tempting to suggest that Turner may have repaid the compliment and looked to Bonington’s lithograph as a source of inspiration in his turn. However, for an artist whose oeuvre was so closely connected with the sea, it is not surprising that Manby’s invention, which by the date Turner was painting had saved almost a thousand sailors from drowning, would have piqued his interest independently of any other artistic creation. What is interesting to consider is whether the insistent movement in Naufrage (Vessel in Distress off Calais Pier), so different to Bonington’s previous work and so redolent of Turner’s later work, might have been the beginning of a new stylistic departure for the younger artist that was cut short by his early death.
A note on the provenance:
This painting comes directly from the family of Baron Jean-Charles Rivet. A childhood friend of Eugène Delacroix, he equally became a friend, patron and student of Bonington. The two travelled together through Switzerland and Northern Italy in the spring of 1826 to sketch from nature and study the great artists of the Renaissance. Rivet went on to become an influential politician. It was he who in 1871 suggested that the role of President of the Republic be introduced, replacing that of the Executive Head of State, which had existed up to this date. Throughout his life he remained a great patron of the arts; works such as the sketch for The Death of Sardanapalus by Delacroix, now in the Louvre, Paris (inv. RF 2488), were gifted from his collection.
This type of scene is a far cry from the gentle views of golden sunshine reflected in pools on the shore that are most immediately recognisable as the artist's work. Patrick Noon suggests the reason for this is that the painting relates to a specific commission that Bonington received around 1827 to illustrate a French edition of Captain George William Manby’s treatise on the Manby Mortar, an apparatus he had invented in 1807 for rescuing people from coastal shipwreck (op. cit., p. 73). To this end, Bonington produced a lithograph after a sketch by Manby that shows a group of gentlemen firing the mortar out to a ship in distress. The inspiration for the lithograph appears to be closely rooted in Dutch painting of the seventeenth century, which Bonington had assiduously studied in the Louvre. However, the present painting demonstrates a much greater creative freedom, and likely takes as its point of departure Thomas Lupton’s mezzotint after J.M.W. Turner’s drawing of the Eddystone Lighthouse, a copy of which Bonington had acquired on his trip to London in 1825 (fig. 1; see Noon, ibid.). In both compositions, all the movement swirls around a central point of light in the darkness of the storm. In the case of Bonington’s painting, this is not a lighthouse but the red flare shot from Fort Rouge, a temporary defensive structure constructed off Calais during the Napoleonic Wars.
A further comparison can be made looking forward to Turner’s painting of 1831, Lifeboat and Manby Apparatus Going Off to a Stranded Vessel (fig. 2; London, Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. no. FA.211). It is very tempting to suggest that Turner may have repaid the compliment and looked to Bonington’s lithograph as a source of inspiration in his turn. However, for an artist whose oeuvre was so closely connected with the sea, it is not surprising that Manby’s invention, which by the date Turner was painting had saved almost a thousand sailors from drowning, would have piqued his interest independently of any other artistic creation. What is interesting to consider is whether the insistent movement in Naufrage (Vessel in Distress off Calais Pier), so different to Bonington’s previous work and so redolent of Turner’s later work, might have been the beginning of a new stylistic departure for the younger artist that was cut short by his early death.
A note on the provenance:
This painting comes directly from the family of Baron Jean-Charles Rivet. A childhood friend of Eugène Delacroix, he equally became a friend, patron and student of Bonington. The two travelled together through Switzerland and Northern Italy in the spring of 1826 to sketch from nature and study the great artists of the Renaissance. Rivet went on to become an influential politician. It was he who in 1871 suggested that the role of President of the Republic be introduced, replacing that of the Executive Head of State, which had existed up to this date. Throughout his life he remained a great patron of the arts; works such as the sketch for The Death of Sardanapalus by Delacroix, now in the Louvre, Paris (inv. RF 2488), were gifted from his collection.