While the german artist Casper David Friedrich was painting his landscapes with figure silhouettes against the forces of nature, in Britain there was another artist captivated by the forces of nature and its elements, namely the sea. This was JMW Turner (1775 - 1851). In my opinion he probably is the only other artist, apart from Leonardo da Vinci, who had a deep desire to discover the elemental power of nature and water in it's truest form, although Leonardo's was true in reproducing it scientifically, Turner's was true in capturing it emotionally.
In Turner's earlier works he mainly deals with pretty landscapes touching on the surface of nature's elements, but in his later works he drowns himself in the elements literally, as can be seen in his famous painting
Snowstorm (1842).
It is a painting of a steamboat off a harbour's mouth, making signals in shallow water in the middle of a storm. The fascinating thing is that Turner was on the boat at the time, as he is quoted as saying
"I only painted it because I wished to show what such a scene was like; I got sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours and did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did. No one has any business to like it."
This painting is the essence of Turner through and through, probably his finest seascape in my opinion. The massive vortex of nature's elements rain, sea, water spray, snow mist, and steam all swirling around almost as if it's swallowing up the boat like a tornado. In a similar way, the viewer gets sucked into this complex vortex of chaotic nothingness. It is painted with such raw energy, that Turner gives the viewer a real perception of what being in the middle of a storm must truly feel like.
Up until Turner, people were used to seeing landscape paintings framed with a sense of superficiality filled with balance and order, so when Turner presented
Snowstorm to the world, he truly caused a new unrest in the art world, for this painting was one with no boundaries, no constraints. It was an epitome of the true spirit of nature in all its disruption, something that I don't think any artist had ever captured.
