J.M.W. Turner’s Plagues: Thinking in Pictures from Single to Serial Forms
J.M.W. Turner’s Plagues: Thinking in Pictures from Single to Serial Forms

Summary/Abstract: This essay examines J.W.M. Turner’s approach to the biblical subject of the plagues of Egypt from the Book of Exodus, when it is mediated by and for a public across geopolitical borders and media boundaries in the wake of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign (1798-1801). The plagues of Egypt mark turning points in J.M.W. Turner’s development as a painter, when heroic and biblical subject matter offered ways of seeing landscape as historical painting and shape his credentials as a Royal Academician and a Professor of Perspective. In approaching the subject of the plagues, the artist selects a point in time and suspends the plot, interrupting and interrogating providential narratives. To revisit the scene from alternative points of view, testing and shifting the elements of the composition is to foreground questions of scale, agency, and affect. Turner’s handling of the plagues across sketchbooks, paintings, and prints, from single to serial, forms his problems of method, from colouring to perspective, scale, and distribution of elements of composition. To reconstruct this process of thinking in pictures is to trace the place, scale, and visibility of the human figure and human suffering within scenes of natural catastrophe, tracing how they appear and disappear from the composition. Exploring the technical layers and ways of seeing means bringing them back into the picture.

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