Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth

Turner once recounted the story of what inspired him to paint Snow Storm:

I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did.^[1]

However, modern art historians doubt the literal truth of this account. Although a paddle steamer called Ariel did exist, there is no record of it departing from Harwich up to 1842.^[2] Furthermore, at the time Turner was 67 years old and in poor health; it is unlikely that he would have survived four hours of exposure to freezing temperatures.^[1]

Turner had depicted steamboats in at least five paintings in the previous decade, including Staffa, Fingal's Cave (1832), Rotterdam Ferry-Boat (1833), and The Fighting Temeraire (1839).^[3]

Snow Storm depicts a dark, menacing storm that engulfs a paddle steamer navigating a rough sea. As the steamer is barely recognizable, it is in fact the painting's title that provides certainty. The silvery pale light that surrounds the boat creates a strong focal point. Turner used a colour palette that includes shades of grey, green, and brown, whilst adding texture to the painting with an impasto technique.^[4]

For many years, one of Turner's pictorial objectives was to convey the sensation of wind motion – in his words: "the greatest difficulty of the painter's art [is] to produce wavy air, as some call the wind". He achieved this in Snow Storm by combining the storm and the engine smoke into a swirling vortex.^[5]

In the mid-18th century, Edmund Burke proposed the aesthetic ideal of the sublime in his treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). He considered the sublime to be antithetical to the classical concept of the beautiful, in the same way that darkness is the opposite of light.^[6]

He described the sublime as that which inspires in us an emotional reaction of awe, particularly when "we encounter an idea of supreme force, violent exertion, or irresistible strength in nature, [which] evokes a degree of terror."^[7] An important aspect of this aesthetic was "the terrible uncertainty [of] obscure descriptions." Burke contended that painting could not match poetry in conveying the sublime, because painting was mimetic – restricted to a literal representation of reality – whereas the poet's words could very easily trascend it.^[5]

Turner sought to demonstrate that painting could rival or even surpass poetry in evoking the sublime. His challenge was to find a way to represent indisticness and obscurity. To do this, he had to develop a new pictorial language that prioritised the elemental energy of nature over a realistic representation of forms.^[5]

Classical painting traditions that had been established during the Renaissance and were still adhered to at the time^[8] called for the literal depiction of forms, linear perspective, smooth gradations of colour, and a paint surface in which brushwork was imperceptible.^[a] Turner broke all of these rules in Snow Storm. He blurs forms to the point that the steamboat is barely distinguishable from its surroundings, he uses a novel vortical composition instead of linear perspective, his coluring has abrupt tonal shifts, and his brushstrokes are forceful and distinct in order to convey the chaotic swirling of wind, ocean spray and steamboat smoke.^[5] As Gowing notes, "anyone who brought to painting a force and an ambition like Turner's found himself in rivalry with the past."^[9]

Turner first captured the essence of the sublime thirty years earlier in Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812).^[10] The painting features a violent snow storm depicted as a vortex that dwarfs the battle below, between Hannibal's army and an Alpine tribe.^[11] This was the first time he had used a vortical composition, which he repeated in Snow Storm.^[5] According to Wilton, with these two works, "after decades of debate over whether painting could capture the essence of the sublime, Turner finally 'grasped the sublime bull by the horns' and ended that discussion."^[12]

The innovative techniques Turner used in this painting generated strong negative and even dismissive comments from conservative critics and academics who believed painters should continue to use classical techniques.^[13] One critic famously referred to it as "soapsuds and whitewash".^[b] The Athenaeum wrote:

This gentleman has, on former occasions, chosen to paint with cream, or chocolate, yolk of egg, or currant jelly – here he uses his whole array of kitchen stuff. Where the steam-boat is – where the harbour begins or where it ends [...] are matters past our finding out. ^[15]

However, in Modern Painters (1843), the contemporary art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) praised it as Turner's best marine painting.^[16]

Modern art historians consider Snow Storm one of Turner's masterpieces. Shanes describes it as "Turner’s finest seascape, and possibly the greatest depiction of a storm in all art."^[14] For Ibata, with this work, "[Turner] provided one of the most adequate pictorial responses to the challenge initiated by Burke's Enquiry, [initiating] a radical transformation of the pictorial medium."^[5] And Moorby observes more generally, that due to his increasingly expressive representation of nature, "Turner has remained an enduring model and touchstone for later practitioners working with immersive light and atmospheric space."^[17]

In 1966, the New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Turner: Imagination and Reality" prominently displayed Snow Storm, framing it as an example of how Turner's late compositions and techniques anticipated the mid-20th century American Abstract Expressionist movement.^[18]