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3/NISIaTHE SUBLIME AND THE BEAUTIFUL IN THEWORKS OF CLAUDE-JOSEPH VERNETTHESISPresented to the Graduate Council of theUniversity of North Texas in PartialFulfillment of the RequirementsFor the Degree ofMASTER OF ARTSByJane E. Howard, B.A.Denton, TexasMay,1994
Howard, Jane E., The Sublime and the Beautiful in theWorks of Claude-Joseph Vernet.History), May 1994, 95 pp.,Master of Arts (Art3 tables, 9 illustrations,bibliography, 33 titles.This thesis examines the roles of the sublime and thebeautiful in the works of eighteenth-century Frenchlandscape painter Claude-Joseph Vernet.An introduction tothe study, a history of the sublime and beautiful, and anoverview of the way these ideas are portrayed in Vernet'scalm and storm pendants are provided.How commissions forthese pendants relate to theoretical developments of thesublime and beautiful and how Vernet became aware of thethese ideas are addressed.The thesis shows Vernet was notdependent on British patrons or on the century's mostinfluential aesthetic treatise on the sublime and thebeautiful by Edmund Burke,because Vernet started paintingsuch themes well before Burke's treatise (1757) and did soin response to French patrons.
TABLE OF CONTENTSivLIST OF TABLES.V.LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.1.2.THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUBLIME AND THEBEAUTIFUL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3.TO THE STUDY.5.8.32PATRONAGE FOR SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFULWORKS BY CLAUDE-JOSEPH VERNET . . . .56.CONCLUSION.83AppendixA.LIST OF MUSEUMS IN THE UNITED STATESTHAT HOLD WORKS BY VERNET. . . . .87.B.A CHRONOLOGY OF CLAUDE-JOSEPH VERNET(1714-1789):THE SUBLIME AND THE BEAUTIFULIN HIS WORK . . . . . . . . . .ANALYSIS OF SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFULWORKS BY CLAUDE-JOSEPH VERNET4.INTRODUCTION.1.ChapterREFERENCE WORKS .iii9093
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONSPageFigureLandscape with Waterfall and Figures,2.Mountain Landscape with Approaching Storm,3.The Villa at Caprarola,Naples), 1746 . . .View of Toulon,.17681.36.37.411775(The Royal Family In.1755.43First5.Morning, 1760 and Tempest at Midday,6.Evening, 1760 and Fire At Night,7.Sunrise, 17598.The Storm,9.Number of Commissions Involving Sublime andBeautiful Pendants Compared with the Total.1759 .46.47.501760.Number of Commissions by Decadeiv1760 . . . . . .4. .5168
LIST OF TABLESTable1.2.3.PagePaintings Commissioned byDecade and by Country of Patron .73Sublime and Beautiful Paintingsby Decade and Countryof Patron . . . . . . . . . . . .74Percentage of Sublime and BeautifulVernet Paintings by Decade andCountry of Patron .V0. 78
CHAPTER ONEINTRODUCTION TO THE STUDYClaude-Joseph Vernet (1714-1789) was well known in histime as an artist who studied and represented in hislandscape paintings the variety of atmospheric effects,weather, geography and human activities in nature that evokedifferent moods in a viewer.Born in Avignon, France,Vernet learned to paint in his youth, first from his father,and later in the studio of a local painter.In the early1730s he traveled to Italy and remained there for nineteenyears.It was in Italy that he established his reputationas a landscape and marine painter, receiving numerouscommissions from the English who were traveling on the GrandAlso well regarded in France, Vernet participated inTour.the Paris Salons from 1746 until his death forty-three yearslater.Central to this study is the idea that aspects ofVernet's works correspond with particular aesthetic ideasthat were popular during the eighteenth century.Fascinatedby nature's variety, Vernet often composed paintings asinterrelated sets of two or four works in which the effectsof nature contrasted and complemented each other.It isithe contrasting pairs particularly that one can see arelationship with the eighteenth-century aesthetic ideas of1
2the sublime and the beautiful.The beautiful was associatedwith qualities in nature or art that evoked in the viewerfeelings of tranquility, tenderness, or affection, while thesublime was connected with the conflicting feelings of aweor terror combined with pleasure.Vernet's depictions offearful storms tossing ships like toy boats with peoplescrambling to find shelter, paired with tranquil scenes ofports bathed in a Claudian light with fishermen castingtheir lines from embankments, perfectly illustrate theconcepts of the sublime and the beautiful.Theoretical writings about the sublime exist as farback as the first century, but those were devoted torhetoric, not art or poetry.In the eighteenth century thesublime and the beautiful were redefined as aesthetic ideasand applied to nature, art, and poetry.The greateststrides in aesthetic theory took place on English soil.Joseph Addison's essays on the "Pleasures of theImagination" in The Spectator(1712) explored beauty andsublimity derived either directly from nature, or throughthe contemplation of objects representing nature,painting or poetry.such as aEdmund Burke was the first theorist tothoroughly analyze the sublime and the beautiful and publishhis findings in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin ofour Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful(1757).TheEnglish patrons on the Grand Tour with whom Vernetassociated would probably have been aware of such popular
3aesthetic theory.Burke's treatise was important in Britishliterary circles and influential elsewhere.A translationof the Enquiry was published in 1765 in France and DenisDiderot's reviews of a Salon of 1767 reflected Burke'sideas.While the Enquiry has long been considered the documentwhich shaped the taste of the second half of the eighteenthcentury, this study shows that sublime and the beautifulaffected taste many years prior to Burke's famous treatise.Additionally, it shows that taste for the sublime and thebeautiful was not just an English phenomenon, but wasfashionable in France as well.The sublime and the beautiful are ideas central to theunderstanding of eighteenth-century art.In my explorationof the literature, no one has conducted an in-depth study ofthe role of the sublime and the beautiful in the works ofVernet.Whether Vernet was influenced by Burke's treatiseon the sublime and the beautiful,or by his English patrons'knowledge of the subject, or he learned of the ideas fromFrench sources had not been explored prior to this study.An analysis of the role of the sublime and the beautiful inVernet's works increases our understanding of his art inrelationship to his time.Additionally, the sublime and the beautiful areimportant to art history because they take a prominent placein the emergence of Romanticism.J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851)
4was just one Romantic who later pursued the sublime and thebeautiful in his own portrayal of storm-tossed ships andClaudian landscapes, not in pairs as Vernet,individual works.but asConsequently, this study of the role ofthe sublime and the beautiful in Vernet's works leads to amore thorough understanding of the foundations ofRomanticism.Recently,for the firsttime,discussion of the sublimeand the beautiful was included in two general art historysurvey texts.The fourth edition of History of Art (1990)by H.W. Janson included a mention of Burke's treatise andthe concepts of the sublime and the beautiful within thecontext of eighteenth-century painters.of Art Through the Ages (1992)The ninth editionincluded a section on thesublime and used quotes from Burke's Enquiry as anintroduction to Romanticism.Inclusion of these ideas inart history survey texts shows their importance to theunderstandingof the history of arteven at the elementarylevel and the fact that knowledge of them is becoming morewidespread.Statement of the ProblemThis thesis examines the role of the eighteenth-centuryconceptions of the sublime and the beautiful in works ofClaude-Joseph Vernet (1714-1789).
5MethodologyTo understand the role of the sublime and the beautifulin the works of Claude-Joseph Vernet,it was necessary (1)to read literature dealing with the sublime and thebeautiful in the eighteenth century in both primary andsecondary sources,(2) to study Vernet's works by means ofviewing paintings, drawings, and prints by and after Vernetand by looking at reproductions,(3) to develop a chronologyof Vernet's art to study the evolution of the sublime andthe beautiful in his career,(4) to try to establish howVernet became aware of the sublime and the beautiful.Literature on the topic of the sublime and thebeautiful written both during the period and about theperiod is abundant.The bibliography provides a list ofsources that were studied.Viewing actual works requiredtravel since no United States museum contains more than acouple of works by Vernet.(Appendix A provides titles,dates, and whereabouts of Vernet works in museums in theUnited States).Works that were studied directly includethe Dallas Museum of Art's Mountain Landscape withApproaching Storm (1778), The Currier Gallery of Art's TheStorm (1759), Coast Scene:Morning(1760) at the ChicagoArt Institute, Landscape with Waterfall and,at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore,Figures (1768)engravings afterVernet held at the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts,and finally,View of the Villa at Caprarola(1746)at the
6Philadelphia Museum of Art.Most of the discussion ofVernet's works in chapter three is based upon the paintingsI viewed firsthand.Reproductions from sources includingexhibition catalogues, museum permanent collectioncatalogues, and other printed sources were examined forworks that could not be seen firsthand.The Kimbell ArtMuseum's Witt Library Photo Collection and the Amon CarterMuseum's New York Public Library: The Artists File served assecondary sources for viewing Vernet's works.The task ofestablishing how Vernet became aware of the sublime and thebeautiful was approached by analyzing commissions for calmand storm pairs listed in Vernet's records, published inLagrange.Review of the LiteratureLagrange's Les Vernet, Joseph Vernetetla peinture auXVIIIe siecle (1864) includes information about Vernet'slife, career,and patrons.Additionally,it listscommissions for Vernet's works taken from Vernet's ownmanuscripts.Ingersoll-Smouse's Joseph Vernet:peintre demarine (1926) compiles three hundred fifty-sevenillustrations of Vernet's works,and supplements Lagrange'sbook by listing titles, descriptions,and dates of paintingsby Vernet that are not found in the artist's commissionrecords.She described her book as a catalogue raisonnandthe work can be accepted as such given the standards of art
7historical scholarship in 1926.The only modern scholar topublish extensive research on Vernet is Philip Conisbee, nowcurator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.Hiswritings on Vernet include a short article for the CurrierGallery of Art Bulletin (1977) on their painting The Storm,which briefly mentions the relationship between Vernet'sworks and the sublime and the beautiful.Conisbee is theauthor of an exhibition catalogue for a 1976 exhibition ofVernet's works in London.Most recently Conisbeecontributed a chapter on eighteenth-century French landscapepainting with a portion devoted to works by Vernet in Claudeto Corot:The Development of Landscape Painting in France.Conisbee has mentioned more than once a relationship betweenVernet's works and the sublime and the beautiful, but todate, an extensive study of the topic has not been conductedby any scholar.
CHAPTER TWOTHE EVOLUTION OF THE SUBLIME AND THE BEAUTIFULThe purpose of this chapter is to provide anunderstanding of the sublime and the beautiful in theeighteenth century by exploring the background of each term,and to follow the development of the sublime and thebeautifulfrom theirclassical meanings into expressions ofaesthetic experience.Theories of sublimity and beauty didnot originate with the eighteenth century.In ancientGreece, Aristotle believed order and symmetry were thefoundations of beauty:The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetryand definiteness, which the mathematical sciencesdemonstrate in a special degree. 1Renaissance artist, architect,and theorist Leon BattistaAlberti, also stressed a need for order and clarity,as wellas symmetry, harmony and proportion of parts to constitutebeauty:2'Aristotle, Poetics 8.1078b.1-2, cited in AlbertHofstadter and Richard Kuhns, eds., Philosophies of Art andBeauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato toHeidegger (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1964; reprint,Phoenix edition, 1976), 96.2MosheBarasch, Theories of Art: From Plato toWincklemann (New York: New York University Press, 1985),124-5.8
9. . . beauty is the harmony of all parts inrelationship to one another.3The sublime, as a style of rhetoric,was also discussedamong the ancients, and a third-century treatise attributedto Longinus in Greece was solely devoted to the topic.4In the eighteenth century these concepts were discussedwidely, but only portions of the classical conceptions ofthe sublime and the beautiful remained in the later era'sunderstanding of the words.The terms took on new meaningsand made a transition from logically-based to emotionallybased experiences.Walter Jackson Bate's From Classic toRomantic described the eighteenth century as a "transitionalmeeting ground between two dominant epochs of thinking. "5Classical humanism, which dominated the thinking of menthrough the seventeenth century was, in the eighteenth,giving way to Romanticism.One can also see this transitionin the evolution of ideas of the sublime and the beautifulduring the eighteenth century.The SublimeOn the Sublime,also called Peri Hupsous, is attributed3Barasch,124, citing Leon Battista Alberti, De reaedificatoria 11.13.4Onthe Sublime, also known as Peri Hupsous was writtenby Longinus in the third century A.D.5WalterJackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic:Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1946), 1.
10to a Greek theorist named Longinus and is believed to havebeen written in the third century A.D.The treatise waswritten as a manual for the technique of persuasion inwriting or oratory known as the sublime style.Longinus did not invent the sublime style.However,Cicero's DeOratore and Orator, written in the first century B.C.,stated that oratory consisted of three divisions defined asgravis, medius, and subtilis, or the great, middle andplain.Of these three styles the sublime was synonymouswith the "great."Other ancient treatises made only slightvariations on this theme and the three-part division ofstyle was still well known throughout the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries.6Many who wrote of the sublime stylereferred to it as the "great" or "grand" style of rhetoric.Samuel Monk's The Sublime, still the most exhaustive studyof the sublime and its evolution,traced the translations ofLonginus's treatise in order to show its popularity and,indeed,its increase in popularity as the eighteenth centurygrew near.Samuel Monk wrote that Longinus is "well withinthe tradition of ancient rhetoric when he treats the sublimestyle as emotive in purpose and as capable of being7expressed both in ornamental and in simple language."6SamuelMonk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theoriesin XVIII-Century England (Modern Language Association ofAmerica, 1935; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, AnnArbor Paperback, 1960), 11.7Ibid.
11However much Longinus's treatise has in common with thetradition of oratory,it also has a direct relationship withthe development of the sublime as an aesthetic concept inthe eighteenth century.Longinus's On the Sublime is an important work to thisstudy because,in the minds of most scholars, it is the rootof all aesthetic theories concerning the sublime in theeighteenth century.Emotions such as fear, awe,andastonishment combined with contradictory feelings of delightor joy, were the products of the sublime in Longinus's timeas well as during the eighteenth century.stirred the soul and elevated the mind.The sublimeFor Longinus,theprimary objective of the sublime was to persuade a listenerto a particular point of view.In the eighteenth centurythe sublime was no longer thought of as a style of rhetoricused for persuasion.It had become a source of aestheticexperience that was sought for that purpose alone.Although On the Sublime went through several editionsover the centuries, it remained somewhat ignored until theeighteenth century.It has often been said that some ofLonginus's popularity in eighteenth-century England wasbecause his writing provided a defense for the love ofEnglish poetry, which frequently did not conform to therules set down by Neoclassicism.'"Monk, 26.
12More pertinent to this study is what Longinus wroteregarding the sublime.Two aspects of On the Sublime thatare of particular importance for the study of theeighteenth-century conception of the sublime are Longinus'sdiscussion of the effect of the sublime on the emotions of alistener,and his recognition that the sublime could beencountered in nature.Longinus described the experience ofthe sublime as one which:. . not only persuades, but even throws anaudience into transport . . . for the mind isnaturally elevated by the true Sublime and sosensibly affected with its lively strokes, that itswells in transport. .It is evident from the portions of On the Sublime that havebeen extracted and quoted here that although Longinus waswriting about the sublime style, he also recognized thesublime as an emotional experience for the listener.Theidea of the audience being thrown into transport isfrequently found in writings about the sublime in theeighteenth century.The idea that the sublime produced theeffect of elevating the mind and that it affected the senseswas also part of the eighteenth century's understanding ofthe experience of the sublime.Longinus wrote about how the sublime affected the soul:9Monk,12, citing Longinus, On the Sublime,3.
13. . . the soul is raised by true sublimity,it gains a proud step upwards, it is filled withjoy and exultation . .Much of the writing of the eighteenth century on the topicof the sublime included the idea that the sublime affectedthe soul.Joseph Addison, who co-edited and contributedessays to a paper called The Spectator in the earlyeighteenth century, wrote about sublimity in 1714:. . We are flung into a pleasing.Astonishment at such unbounded Views, and feel adelightful Stillness and Amazement in the Soul atthe Apprehension of them."Edmund Burke wrote of his feelings upon the sight of a floodin Dublin:It gives me great pleasure to see nature inIt fills thethese great, though terrible scenes.mind with grand ideas and turns the soul upon.12itselfIn addition to its impact on the soul, Longinus emphasizedthe power of the sublime in controlling the audience.Hesaid:'*J.T. Boulton, introduction to A Philosophical Enquiryinto Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful by EdmundBurke (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1958), xlv, citing Longinus, On theSublime, 9."Donald F. Bond, ed., The Spectator Vol.IIIClarendon Press), 540.(Oxford:'2Monk, 87, citing Edmund Burke in A.P.I. Samuels, TheEarly Life, Correspondence and Writings of Edmund Burke(Cambridge, 1923), 84.
14"In most cases it is wholly in our powereither to resist or yield to persuasion.But theSublime endued with strength irresistible, strikeshome, and triumphs over every hearer.1Similarly, Edmund Burke wrote in A Philosophical Enquiryinto the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and theBeautiful,published in 1757:. . . [the sublime] is productive of thestrongest emotion which the mind is capable offeeling.14Still, Longinus's objective was to persuade a listener tocome to realize a particular point of view.The emotionalresponse of the listener to the sublime in the style ofrhetoric was secondary to the purpose.as a means to an end.The sublime servedDuring the ei
exhibition catalogues, museum permanent collection catalogues, and other printed sources were examined for works that could not be seen firsthand. The Kimbell Art Museum's Witt Library Photo Collection and the Amon Carter Museum's New York Public Library: The Artists File served as secondary sources for viewing Vernet's works. The task of
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