ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the visual rendering of shipwreck evolved across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing on arguably the three most famous artists to take up this theme were Vernet, Theodore Gericault and Joseph Mallord William Turner and also on a lesser-known artist, James Northcote. Tracing shifting conceptions of and approaches to the well-established aesthetic category of the sublime, to emphasize the changing contexts in which scenes of shipwreck were experienced and reexperienced visually. If earlier artists were usually producing works for private residences, Vernet by the 1760s and thereafter Gricault and Turner exhibited their work in public spaces such as the Paris Salon and the Royal Academy in London. It must be stressed that visual depictions of shipwreck in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at least when fully worked up into paintings, cannot be understood in terms of straightforward reportage.
