The Shipwreck

Claude-Joseph Vernet

National Gallery of Art

A masted ship with tattered sails crashes near a rocky shore among choppy waves, beneath a sky filled with charcoal-gray clouds in this horizontal landscape painting. More then two dozen men and women are scattered among the wreckage and along the shore. They all have pale skin and are small in scale within the landscape. Some of them are barefoot, and they wear clothing in ivory white, ruby red, slate gray, beige, or teal blue. The tall mast of the ship pitches at a steep angle from near the lower right corner of the canvas toward the upper left. A narrow red flag streams in the wind from the top of the mast. Seven men cling to the crow’s nest, a platform near the top of the mast, and on the mast around it. More people work amid a fallen sail on the ship’s deck and dangle from the rigging that is being pulled ashore by others. The ship’s second mast is broken in half, splintered where it has fallen against jagged boulders in the lower right corner. On the shore, a woman wearing a pink dress and blue stockings holds her arms up to the sky as a bare-chested man wraps his arms around her waist. A man nearby hunches over as he hauls in a cage from the surf. To our left, a second woman is surrounded by three men, two of whom support her torso. She wears a pale yellow skirt and her white shirt has fallen to expose one breast. Two trunks and a large roll of cloth are piled behind the trio, to our left. On the other side of the group, a brown dog sits and looks back over its shoulder toward a man who rolls a barrel onto the beach. A rocky, vertical cliff nearly spans the height of the left edge of the painting, and the cliffs continue along the waterline into the distance. Two people perch on a rocky outcropping near those on the beach, and a tree with a cracked, splintered trunk is doubled back by the wind above the pair. Water sprays high against the cliffs beyond, and a fortress with a castle sits atop the cliffs in the distance. Farther out in the water and to our right, a second ship with sails bulging in the wind lurches to the right. A streak of bright, golden-yellow lightning zigzags in the bank of clouds over this ship and reaches the horizon to our left, illuminating the low skyline of a town in the deep distance, beyond the cliffs. The clouds around the lightning are bathed in coral-peach light, but the surrounding clouds are dark gray. The artist signed and dated the work as if he had inscribed the side of one trunk, near the lower left corner, “J. Vernet F. 1772.”