Claude Joseph Vernet (French, 1714-1789) Shipwrecked... Lot 42

Claude Joseph Vernet (French, 1714-1789) Shipwrecked on a rocky coast, 1780 Copper. Signed and dated lower left 'J. Vernet f. 1780'. Height 39.4 Width 55.3 cm. Louis XVI period carved and gilded oak frame with gadroons, n°482. Provenance: - bought by the Duc de Liancourt on December 30, 1780 for one thousand two hundred livres ; - former collection of Professor Emile Aron (1907-2011), Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Tours. Claude Joseph Vernet, 1780. A painting depicting shipwreck victims on a rocky shore. On a copper plate. In a Louis XVI carved and gilded oakwood frame. Bibliography : - Léon Lagrange, Joseph Vernet et la peinture au XVIIIe siècle : les Vernet avec le texte des Livres de Raison, 1864, p.371, n°219 : "Le 30 (décembre 1780) j'ay reçû de M. le duc de Liancourt pour un petit tableau sur cuivre représentant deux cadavres sur un rocher isolé au bord de la mer 1200 l(ivres)" ; - Florence Ingersoll-Smouse, Joseph Vernet (1714-1789), peintre de marine: Etude critique suivie d'un catalog raisonné de son œuvre peint, T.II,1926, page 116, n°1047. End of storm: "Two corpses on an isolated rock by the sea." - "Small painting on copper." LE VERNET DU DUC DE LIANCOURT, by the Turquin cabinet As early as the 1750s, Joseph Vernet made shipwreck subjects fashionable, with a few bodies washed up on the coast, a theme he continued to pursue throughout his career. Following in his footsteps, landscape painters in the second half of the 18th century depicted natural disasters such as storms, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, describing man's powerlessness in the face of Nature's might, and foreshadowing the Romantic movement. Weather is seen as an echo of inner torments. A source of the Sublime, Diderot In his commentaries on salons, Diderot praised Vernet, writing in 1763: "If he stirs up a storm, you hear the winds whistle, and the waves roar; you see them rise against the rocks". The English philosopher Edmund Burke, in his essay Philosophical Investigation of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757, asserts: "everything that is terrible... is a source of the Sublime". The feeling of fear, of solitude in the face of infinity, gives rise to an aesthetic emotion. These anecdotes were developed in the literature of the time, for example in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's novel Paul et Virginie. Even today, delight in these tragic subjects is dramatized in the cinema (cf. the film Titanic). X composition The viewer's eye is level with the water: the horizon line, a third of the way up the picture, is broken by the undulating waves. Our composition is structured around strong geometrical axes, notably in X. From the lower left-hand corner, the upward movement starts from the waves and rises to the cliff. The other diagonal descends from the clouds to the floating piece at bottom right. The two figures are stranded on a rock in the center of this cross. They are a naked couple, holding hands, associating Love in Death, Eros and Thanatos, not without a certain eroticism. The luminosity and transparency of copper In this small format for amateurs, Vernet retains the particularly realistic aspect of stormy skies and stormy seas that made his large canvases so successful. Atmospheric variations are rendered in a chromatic harmony of gray and blue, enhanced by skilfully placed touches of red and the white foam of the waves. The luminosity and transparency of the copper support underline the high pictorial quality of the whole. Here, Vernet transcends his models, Salvator Rosa, Jacob van Ruisdael, Ludolf Bakhuizen and Adrien Manglard. Legend has it that the artist had himself tied to a mast in the middle of a storm, in order to capture the unleashing of the elements as faithfully as possible and capture the feelings he experienced. The beginnings of Romanticism The apogee of descriptions of rough seas and storms came in the 19th century with Gudin and Isabey in France, and the drawings of Victor Hugo, Courbet and Turner in England... Vernet's direct heirs were none other than the Romantic painters Théodore Géricault and his own grandson, Horace Vernet. At the time of the sinking of La Méduse, these two painters multiplied this type of dramatic seascape: L'Épave by the former (Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts) and La Vague by the latter (circa 1820-1825, private collection) are echoes of our painting. . This thematic filiation has been studied in the excellent exhibition at the Musée de la Vie Romantique in Paris ("Tempêtes et naufrages. De Vernet à Courbet" May 19 - September 12, 2021). Painter's biography Born in Avignon in 1714, Joseph Vernet left