Notice de l'oeuvre :
Since the very beginning of his career Eugène Isabey aimed at excelling in the genre of marine painting. Even though he did not wish, at first, to follow in the footsteps of his father, Jean-Baptiste Isabey (1767-1855), who worked as one of the most renowned miniaturists of the Empire, Eugène became a talented and prolific painter, lithographer and watercolourist. A substantial portion of his artistic production focused on the representation of ships in turbulent and unforgiven storms. Isabey exhibited a marine painting for the first time at the Salon in 1824, when Delacroix stole the scene with his Massacre at Scio. Isabey’s work was particularly praised for his delicate and sophisticated palette, which he was able to enhance over time thanks to his collaborations with Bonington and Delacroix, who became his close friends following a trip to London in 1825. Isabey exhibited remarkable representations of landscapes of Normandy at the 1827 Salon which earned him a gold medal. Normandy was very dear to him, and was indeed the subject of many of his marine paintings. In 1830 he participated, alongside Théodore Gudin, in the Algiers Campaign as official painter of the Marine. Over that decade Isabey anticipated people's interest in the landscapes of Brittany, a land still poorly accessible to potential visitors whose popularity had been fuelled by the poetic genius of Chateaubriand. Isabey visited Normandy frequently until 1874, year in which his poor health forced him to retire in Nice.
Given its narrow format and its vertical layout, our seascape constitutes a rare work in the œuvre of Isabey, whose respectable reputation mainly rested on his large shipwreck scenes (ill. 1). In this work the painter offers the representation of a dark seascape in which the high waves and dark sky merge. The rhythm of the impetuous waves that violently reach the shore from which the artist captured the scene enables the viewer to measure the magnitude of the storm. In the background on the right appears a ship bent on its left side with unstable sails which seems to be destined to be swallowed by the darkness of the ocean and the sky. It is interesting to notice the presence of two seagulls flying on the violent water since their inclusion is fairly rare in Isabey’s marine paintings.
Scenes of drowning and shipwrecks were numerous and popular in public exhibitions in Paris and London between 1770 and 1830. The artists who aimed at breaking with the classical tradition tried to modernise the genre by expressing the more metaphorical and exciting characteristics of different seascapes. Since the sensibility of the time entailed a profound interest in natural catastrophes, “the storm” became a new fascinating subject. Hence, artists started to oppose the monumentality of classicising landscapes and seascapes with the pictorial expression of the feelings of violence and the sublime. In a watercolour study for the Raft of the Medusa created in the vicinity of Le Havre in 1818, Gericault highlighted the power and energy of waves by juxtaposing them to the human effort that is here personified by the ship in the foreground (ill. 2). Gericault’s monochrome palette and the presence of a second ship, which appears like a ghost in the distance, intensify the dramatic tension of the scene. The fate of the ship displayed in the foreground, which, being the personification of human impotence, is portrayed without any figures on board, seems entirely dependent on the wave which approaches. Other artists, such as Horace Vernet, Paul Huet and Charles Mozin, similarly painted hostile waves crashing into cliffs and rocks. When figures are included in these compositions, the size of their representation is drastically reduced, ultimately crystallising their impotence in front of the vastness of that terrifying nature. The drama and the strong feeling of the sublime conveyed by these depictions discourage any hopeful thoughts in the viewer. Following in the footsteps of these painters, Isabey had a significant role in this new romantic movement and conceived his own version of the Raft of the Medusa (unknown location). In our painting he endeavoured in a touching representation of anxiety, despair and of the potentially catastrophic effects of the frenzy of nature on humans and their creations.
Even though Isabey explored typically Romantic subjects and themes, he also experimented with new viewpoints. For the creation of our painting he positioned himself in front of the ocean, which here becomes the metaphor of pure movement. Hypnotised by the ebb and flow of the water, which conveys both the timelessness of the world and the immediacy of time, Isabey positions himself close to the sea as if in an attempt to confront it in a context which goes beyond time and space — indeed, the painting does not provide any references to a specific setting. The foamy waves personify the force and immensity of the ocean, whose substantiality and permanence is captured by the artist like a detail would be captured by the camera lens of a photographer. In doing so Isabey provides an image that seems to anticipate those by Courbet (ill. 3) in which spatial contextualisation is omitted and the waves, portrayed frontally, are the absolute protagonists.
Other than the larger canvases which granted him success throughout his career, Isabey also created paintings of smaller formats whose dimensions resemble those of our seascape and of the one in the Museum of Amiens (ill. 4). Both these paintings possibly have a more natural and delicate character compared to the larger ones. In our painting the artist translated with naturalism the extraordinarily power of the elements. Isabey penetrated with his eyes and his brushstrokes the stormy waters: he used an almost transparent and liquid layer of paint which perfectly conveys the weight of the waves, and materialised the sea foam with tiny and luminous spots of impasto. The solid, bold and energetic representation of the sky highlights the ephemeral and transient character of the storm. The free brushstrokes anticipate the vigorous sketches painted en plein air that were recurrently created by impressionist artists later on in the 19th century — Isabey was definitely one of the first artists to endeavour in the translation of light with colour. Our charming painting ultimately exemplifies the position occupied by the painter in the evolution of 19th century seascapes: through his painterly work he managed to create a fruitful link between the British Romantics and his pupils, the proto-impressionists Boudin and Jongkind.
Carola Scisci and
Léopoldine Duchemin
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