Deep Time and the Historical Sublime in J. M. W. Turner’s Late Work

One of the defining expressions of the sublime in J. M. W. Turner’s work lies in his sustained engagement with the processes and meaning of history. The present paper argues that Turner’s distinctive late pictorial manner can be interpreted as expressing the ruptures and uncertainties that characterized the historical imagination of his time. It responded to a momentary perception of the historical field as unbounded and ultimately unrepresentable, before professional historians introduced more structured frameworks of interpretation in the second half of the nineteenth century. It also reflected a growing recognition of the disjunction between human temporalities and deep time against a backdrop of geological theories that suggested that the age of the earth much exceeded biblical chronologies. The paper focuses on the way these developments inform a conception of the ›historical sublime‹ that is specific to Turner, with a more specific emphasis on his late Venice paintings, which impart a disquieting view of history in which the human element is mostly transient, if not irrelevant.