The Cave of the Storm Nymphs by Poynter: Beauty in the Sea's Shadow (1903)
Outside the mouth of a sea cave, a ship is breaking apart on the rocks. Its masts lean, its hull is splitting, and green waves smash over the wreck. Inside the cave, three nymphs pay no attention to the drowning sailors. One crouches on a rock playing a golden lyre made from a scallop shell. Another kneels and reaches back towards a treasure chest that has washed in. The third lies on the wet sand among scattered gold coins and spilled jewels. The Cave of the Storm Nymphs, shown at the Royal Academy in 1903 by Sir Edward Poynter, is one of the last great mythological fantasies of British academic painting.
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Artist: Sir Edward John Poynter (1836–1919)
Date: 1903 (an earlier version dates from 1902)
Medium: Oil on canvas, about 146 × 110 cm
First shown: Royal Academy, London, 1903
Collection: Private collection; the 1902 version is in the Hermitage Museum and Gardens, Norfolk, Virginia
What does the painting show?
Poynter builds the picture like a stage. The dark rock walls of the cave frame an opening onto the storm, where the wrecked ship tilts among the breakers. Everything inside the cave comes from that ship: broken timbers and a ship's gun on the left, a treasure chest wedged against the rocks on the right, a small casket of jewels lying open on the sand, gold coins scattered everywhere. The nymphs are not rescuers. They are collectors.
The three figures are arranged in a rising diagonal. At the bottom, the reclining nymph lies on a patterned cloth, one arm behind her head, the other trailing lazily towards the jewels. In the middle, the second nymph, her long red-gold hair blown by the wind, turns back towards the chest as if she has just spotted the best prize. At the top, the third sits on a rock with her lyre, the only one who seems to look out at the wreck, perhaps singing the song that drew it in.
The painting was shown with lines of verse describing sea nymphs who sing "careless of wreck or ruin", and that phrase sums up the mood. The nymphs are beautiful, calm and completely indifferent to human suffering. The contrast between the warm, smooth bodies in the cave and the cold violence of the sea outside is the whole point of the picture.
Poynter, the academic master
Poynter was born in Paris in 1836, studied at the Royal Academy Schools in London and then in Paris under the classical painter Charles Gleyre, alongside Whistler and George du Maurier. He made his name with huge historical scenes such as Israel in Egypt (1867) and became one of the most powerful figures in British art: the first Slade Professor at University College London, director of the National Gallery from 1894 to 1904 and president of the Royal Academy from 1896 to 1918. He was made a baronet in 1902. Through his wife, Agnes Macdonald, he was the brother-in-law of Edward Burne-Jones and the uncle of Rudyard Kipling.
Like his contemporaries Frederic Leighton and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Poynter painted the ancient world with a smooth, highly finished surface. Compare the sleeping figure of Leighton's Flaming June, or, across the Channel, Bouguereau's The Wave and Cabanel's Birth of Venus, where the sea is again the setting for the female nude.
A shipwreck seen from the other side
Most shipwreck paintings take the point of view of the victims, from Géricault's Raft of the Medusa to the quiet grief of Bárbara y Balza's Shipwrecked. Poynter turns the tragedy around. We stand inside the cave with the creatures of the sea, and the wreck becomes a distant spectacle, almost a decoration. It is a picture about seduction and danger, and also about the cold indifference of nature.
Where is it now?
Poynter painted two versions of the composition. The first, of 1902, is in the Hermitage Museum and Gardens in Norfolk, Virginia, and a preparatory study of 1901 is in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The 1903 picture exhibited at the Royal Academy is in a private collection. Its value shows how taste has changed: when it was sold at Christie's in the 1920s it fetched a few hundred pounds, but by 1988 it was estimated at several hundred thousand.
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Sources
Wikipedia, "The Cave of the Storm Nymphs" and "Edward Poynter"; Encyclopaedia Romana (University of Chicago), "Poynter: The Cave of the Storm Nymphs".
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