Seascapes of the Sublime: Vernet, Monet, and the Oceanic Feeling

Abstract

southern coast of Brittany (fig. 1). In its fantastic configurations of grottoes, needles, and reefs formed by the incessant workings of the wind and waves, Belle-Ile offers as fine an example as any in France of that category of natural scenery that during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came to be designated as the sublime. It is not the sublime forces and forms of nature that can concern us alone, however, for as its theoreticians make clear, the sublime is not an ontology but a phenomenology, not a special essence of certain things but rather an experience of a particular kind, born out of the encounter between consciousness and the world. Gustave Flaubert vividly testifies to the emotional transports provoked by a sojourn in Belle-Ile. In the company of the critic Maxime Du Camp, Flaubert voyages to the remote island solely to see its sea and rocks. Long, precarious walks on the terrifying, primeval cliffs leave the men enervated and exhausted, susceptible to the feeling of an ineluctable immersion in the alluring vastness of nature. Flaubert's euphoric description of the sights of Belle-Ile is a paradigm of the sublime: