Abstract
In the late 1790s and early 1800s J. M. W. Turner was engaged in the production of a series of paintings focusing on biblical themes. Five of these paintings, The Fifth Plague of Egypt (1800), The Tenth Plague of Egypt (1802), The Holy Family (1803), The Deluge (1805), and The Destruction of Sodom (1805) are extant; a sixth, The Army of the Medes (1801), is untraced. In this chapter I will consider how this lost painting bears on questions of war, representation and the transmission of affect in visual culture of the late Georgian period. I am interested in particular in how The Army of the Medes, a work focused ostensibly on the destruction of a military force in ancient Persia, responds to the culmination of the British campaign against the French in Egypt at the turn of the nineteenth century. As I will go on to argue, the painting raises complex questions about the relations between biblical and historical notions of truth, the connections between war, visualisation, and the concept of the sublime, and the political connotations of the discourse of sympathy.
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Notes and references
J. Ziff, ‘Proposed Studies for a Lost Turner Painting’, Burlington Magazine, 106 (1964), pp. 328–33 (p. 330).
Cited in M. Butlin and E. Joll, The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), vol. 1, p. 3.
T. Costello, Turner and the Subject of History (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 51.
E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. A. Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1757; 1990), p. 36.
J. Lindsay, Turner: The Man and His Art (London: Granada, 1985), p. 33.
R. Carroll and S. Prickett, The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 857.
For an informative account of the British campaign in Egypt see P. Mackesy, British Victory in Egypt: The End of Napoleon’s Conquest (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010).
For an authoritative account of the French campaign see J. Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
A. Livermore ‘JMW Turner in 1797’, Burlington Magazine, 94, (1957), pp. 48–51. Cited in Butlin and Joll, The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner, p. 13.
Turner, quoted in A. Wilton, Turner and the Sublime (London: British Museum Publications Ltd, 1980), p. 37.
J. Thomson, The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, ed. J. Sambrook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 63–4: ll. 962–73, ll. 976–7; p. 121: l.1183; p. 156: ll. 1050–1.
For further details see P. Harrington, British Artists and War: The Face of Battle in Paintings and Prints, 1700–1914 (London: Greenhill Books, 1993), pp. 79–85.
M. A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 219.
J. Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. A. Fowler (London and New York: Longman, 1667; 1971).
S. Wolfson, Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 429: ll.29–33.
Homer, Iliad, Book 13. ll. 334–7; Herodotus, The Histories, Book 8, ch.65; Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book 40, p. 441. Quotations cited in E. Echols, ‘Military Dust’, The Classical Journal, 46 (1951): 285–8.
P. Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 11–13.
A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6th edn (London: A. Miller, 1790). Republished as A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2006), p. 3.
T. Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 70.
Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols, ed. J. J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–91), vol. 3, p. 28.
L. da Vinci, Notebooks, ed. T. Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 176.
H. C. Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. T. Sadler, 3 vols, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1869), vol. 1, p. 96; Annals of the Fine Arts, 3 (1819), p. 299.
C. von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. M. Howard and P. Paret (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1832; 1993), p. 117. That Turner continued to meditate on this subject is evident from the watercolour sketch ‘A Hurricane in the Desert (the Simoom)’, which the artist designed in 1830–2 as an illustration to Samuel Rogers’ poem ‘Human Life’ (1819). Appended to lines describing the fate of travellers in the desert (‘and in an instant lost — A hollow wave / Of burning sand their everlasting grave!’), the image, showing fallen animals and humans, dominated by a consuming, black vortex — the Simoom, or ‘poison wind’ of the title — signals, once again, Turner’s abiding preoccupation with impaired sight, contested ground and the futility of imperial command. See S. Rogers, Poems (London: T. Cadell, 1836), p. 94. See also M. Gamer, ‘A Hurricane in the Desert (The Simoom), for Rogers’s ‘Poems’ c. 1830–2 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, August 2006, revised by N. Moorby, July 2008, ed D. Blayney Brown, J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours (2012) [http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-a-hurricane-in-the-desert-the-simoom-for-rogerss-poems-r1133352, date accessed 20 May 2014].
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Shaw, P. (2015). Turner’s Desert Storm. In: Ramsey, N., Russell, G. (eds) Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137474315_9
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