The Angel Standing in the Sun

Turner and Melville had no other peers when it came to capturing “the poetry of the Ship—her voyages and her crew.” Much of Turner’s work was sure to appeal to Melville because it featured so often the majesty of the sea, and the stark beauty of the tall ships. He couldn’t help but identify with a great artist boldly willing to impose his vision on a scene that others saw only in the most literal terms. Turner’s work showed him how to take real experiences at sea and merge them with the swirling impressions of something greater and more imaginative.1Turner’s fondness for experimenting with colors and shapes created mysteries in his canvases that realists abhorred. This was especially true in the 1840s when Turner took up a subject that was entirely new to him. A rich patron—Elhanan Bicknell, an Englishman in the whale oil business—encouraged him to create a few works featuring whaling ships and their prey. The painter had never been at sea in one of the ships, but the possibilities intrigued him, especially because most people knew so little about the look and movements of these enormous sea creatures.

Bicknell gave Turner a learned book on the subject—Thomas Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale—and after carefully examining various sections of it, Turner set to work. (“Turner’s pictures of whalers were suggested by this book,” Melville wrote on the title page of Beale’s history when he bought a copy in 1850.) Neither the businessman nor the critics liked the results of the painter’s efforts.

Fashionable London wasn’t ready for Turner’s whales. Critics ridiculed two of his paintings that were exhibited at the Royal Academy. One of the comic wits of Punch suggested that one of the paintings was really a shadowy sketch of “lobster salads.” More serious was the attack in William Harrison Ainsworth’s New Monthly Magazine, which claimed that Turner’s pictures were so garishly ugly that they cast a shadow over every other work exhibited at the Royal Academy. “Mr. Turner is a dangerous man,” warned the magazine, “and ought to be suppressed. But if he must continue to work in this brimstone vein, he ought to have a small apartment to himself, where he could do no harm.”2

The common complaint against Turner’s work of this period was that his views of real objects were “indistinct,” and no one could tell what was what. The bold use of color, the dreamlike visions, the subtle play of light, and the mere hint of distant shapes were annoying to buyers accustomed to lush realism. When an American collector complained about one of Turner’s paintings being “indistinct,” the artist took the criticism in stride, saying, “You should tell him that indistinctness is my fault.” When the next exhibition at the Royal Academy opened, Turner defiantly came back with two more paintings of whaling ships—one of which bore the clumsy and unattractive title Whalers (Boiling Blubber) Entangled in Flaw Ice, Endeavouring to Extricate Themselves. He was thumbing his nose at the marketplace, brazenly showing his independence and his refusal to bend to its demands. Of course, both went unsold, but so too did one of the great masterpieces of the century, his apocalyptic vision in a brilliant gold tint, The Angel Standing in the Sun—a disturbingly beautiful explosion of light at the end of time.3

Like Turner at his easel, Melville learned to make a virtue of the fault of indistinctness. Moby-Dick is the literary equivalent of a gallery filled with the best of Turner’s canvases. So much of the book shows the painter’s influence, which can be felt in the bold sweep of the story, in the iridescence of the language, and in the author’s frequent willingness to cast a suggestive haze over certain scenes. Moby-Dick features an overwhelming collection of powerful scenes in which the shapes we know from reality float in a tumultuous wash of colors and images spilling from the artist’s eye. The effect is what happens when the “great flood-gates of the wonder-world”—as Ishmael calls them—swing wide, producing a cascade of suggestive impressions whose full force may not be understood for years. The first image of the great white whale in Moby-Dick is a Turner oil in eleven words—“one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.” (It was also a good description of Mount Greylock that winter.)4

When Ishmael is in New Bedford at the beginning of the book and decides to visit the Whaleman’s Chapel, a painting catches his eye as he watches Father Mapple mount the pulpit to deliver a sermon on Jonah and the whale. A large work dominating the wall behind the preacher, it shows a ship in distress, fighting to stay afloat in a violent storm “off a lee coast” where the winds have brought it dangerously close to “black rocks.” But in the bleak sky overhead there is a bright beam of sunlight breaking through, and in the middle of that radiance is an angel offering hope—or so Ishmael believes. He thinks the angel is saying, “Beat on, thou noble ship . . . for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling off—serenest azure is at hand.”5

In a book that consistently questions conventional religious dogma, this vision of an angel emerging from the sun is not some pious appeal to faith, as young Ishmael—yet untested by his voyage on the Pequod—innocently presumes. It is a profound omen, a sign of the dangers awaiting Ahab and his crew when they commence their voyage on Christmas. As a warning, it is as wasted as all the others because the temptation to overreach for glory or revenge or pride is so strong. But there is something much darker at work here. It is one of the first hints in the book of Melville’s fear that all human endeavor, no matter how grand or seemingly righteous, is doomed to fail and be tainted by what he calls the “horrible vulturism of earth”—the universal predatory urge that sweeps humanity into countless voyages to chase and capture one thing or another. It is the vision that Turner brought to his canvas when he painted the work that Melville alludes to in the description of the chapel painting—The Angel Standing in the Sun.6

In Turner’s masterpiece the angel standing in the middle of the sun may look benign at first glance, but it is the archangel Michael holding his sword aloft on the Day of Judgment, and in the molten gold of the light pouring down from him, there is nothing below but a few frightened humans fleeing in panic and despair. Overhead, like a blot on the canvas, is a swarm of black birds circling in a frenzy. It was one of the great magical effects of Turner’s brushwork that he was able to create the impression of an overwhelming light circling outward and turning inward at the same time. Light flows from the angel while seeming to collapse into a vortex at the outer edges, swallowing the shadowy humans below.

Then again, Turner was a master at painting an elemental vortex, especially at sea. What the noted painter and art critic Sir Lawrence Gowing says of light in Turner could also be said of humanity in Melville’s vision of a universal vulturism: “Light is not only glorious and sacred, it is voracious, carnivorous, unsparing. It devours impartially, without distinction, the whole living world.”7

Near the end of Moby-Dick, as Ahab closes in on his fatal encounter with the whale in what he calls his forty years of “war on the horrors of the deep,” the dawn comes up one morning in a blaze of light that drenches the whole scene and turns the sea into “a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.” It is a frightening but gorgeous Turneresque moment, with sunlight flashing in all directions. Blind to the approaching danger, Ahab mistakes this explosion of light as nature yielding to his will. At this moment, he thinks he is not only a great captain, but a Neptune whose ship is a “sea-chariot” towing the sun across the world, independent of any other power on earth. Fueled by his “fatal pride,” Ahab soon finds his whale, and the two mighty enemies engage in a battle to the death that will sink the Pequod and send every member of its crew to the bottom—except Ishmael. After the whale rams it, the ship is swallowed in a ravenous “vortex” of water. The famous scene is nothing less than a prose version of Turner’s The Angel Standing in the Sun complete with “archangelic shrieks,” as Melville puts it, accompanying the disappearance of the mainmast beneath the waves, and the flocks of birds suddenly appearing overhead: “Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf.”8

Notes:

   1. Review of HM’s White-Jacket in the Athenaeum, February 2, 1850 (HMCR, 296). HM read of Turner’s work as early as 1848 in Ruskin’s Modern Painters (Sealts, Melville’sReading, 89).
   2. Steven Olsen-Smith, “Melville’s Copy of Thomas Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale and the Composition of Moby-Dick,” Harvard Library Bulletin 21 (Fall 2010): 1–77; “A Scamper Through the Exhibition of the Royal Academy,” Punch 8 (1845): 233; and “A Peep into the Royal Academy,” New Monthly Magazine, June 1845.
   3. Leslie, Autobiographical Recollections, 138.
   4. “Loomings,” chapter 1, Moby-Dick.
   5. Ibid., “The Pulpit,” chapter 8.
   6. Ibid., “The Funeral,” chapter 69.
   7. Quoted in Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, 171.
   8. “The Needle,” chapter 124, and “The Chase—Third Day,” chapter 135, Moby-Dick. For discussion of another painting in Moby-Dick with suggestions of Turner’s style, see Robert K. Wallace, “Melville and the Visual Arts,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, where Wallace writes about the “squitchy picture” of “unimaginable sublimity” in the Spouter-Inn (349).

Michael Shelden
Melville in Love