#romanticism

This was the one that made him, from what I've read — it caused a real stir when it first went on show, mostly because of how sexual people found it, and he painted the idea more than once afterwards. Much later people started treating it as an early go at the unconscious, decades before anyone had the vocabulary for that.

Nobody commissioned this one. It was, from what I've read, a deliberate swing at getting noticed — built out of long conversations with two men who lived through the wreck, plus a scale model of the raft set up in the studio. The disaster itself was a national scandal, mostly because the captain had got his command through connections rather than any skill at sea.

No one seems fully sure who the man is supposed to be — some accounts say a friend, others think he's simply invented to give the scene someone to stand in for. Paintings like this get filed under Romanticism, when nature itself started getting treated as something close to religious.

It was made to order, from what I've read — he put the idea to the new government himself once the French had been pushed back out of Madrid, and got it paid for. There's a companion picture the same size showing the day before, when the fighting started.

This was one of over a hundred Bible scenes his patron, Thomas Butts, paid him to paint — Revelation chapter twelve, if you want the reference.

The story behind it came from a Byron play about an Assyrian king who, with defeat coming, has everything he owns destroyed in front of him rather than let anyone else have it. Apparently the critics went for it hard when it was first shown, and it did him no favours with the officials who handed out state commissions.

Supposedly he painted the sea from memory indoors rather than out in front of it, and turned out thousands over a lifetime — storms and wrecks by the dozen, selling about as fast as he could make them.

He painted this same set-up at least three times, from what I can find, swapping a woman in for one of the men in a later go. There's a story that he looked at the two of them in their old-fashioned German coats and said they were up to demagogic intrigues — supposedly a joke about how that kind of dress had become politically suspect to the authorities at the time.

The fighting behind this was three days on the barricades in Paris that swapped one king for another. The state bought it almost straight away, and then — from what I've read — kept it off the walls for years, because a picture of an armed crowd winning turned out to be an awkward thing to display once the new lot were in charge.

Sailors reckoned waves arrive in runs and the ninth one is the one that finishes you — supposedly that's where the name comes from. He was a navy painter by trade and, from what I've read, worked from memory in the studio rather than out in front of the water.

Wrecks at sea sold well, and this one got engraved as a print not long after, which is supposedly how most people at the time would have run into it rather than in any gallery.

The scene comes straight out of Dante — the poet being rowed across a river in hell, steadied by his old Roman guide, while the drowned try to climb aboard. From what I've read it was the first big thing he ever showed in public, and it more or less made his name on the spot.

The story that went round was that he'd had himself lashed to a ship's mast for hours in a real storm to see one properly — apparently that claim has been doubted for a very long time now. The critics of the day weren't kind either; one of them dismissed it as soapsuds and whitewash.