What fate's arrangement is, we don't know for sure. But we at least know what we can do.
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Hello everyone, today is not very good, did not read a book or write a big manuscript, nestled at home for a day, watching the news of the volcanic eruption in Tonga, I remembered a painting by a British painter Turner, whom I like very much.
Battleship Dreadnought dragged to disintegration
Joseph Mallord William Turner is a very special person, because we know that in the history of Western painting, most painters have specialized in religious painting, portrait painting or history painting, and the kind of landscape painting that Chinese literati and doctors like has not had a very high status in Europe.
This line of thinking may be related to Western religious thought, in Which human beings are God's last and most beautiful creature, so it is rightful to embody the most divinity. It is rightfully the element of the artwork that is the focus of the artwork, and as for the scenery behind the characters, this thing seems to be secondary. In the oil paintings left by many famous artists we see today, the scenery behind the characters is painted by their assistants and even art apprentices.
When he was young, Turner did this kind of work, and after graduating from the academy of fine arts, he encountered the difficulties that young artists usually encountered--poor, his paintings could not be sold, so he had to find a part-time job, and every night he earned money by painting the background of famous painters. The job was tiring and cheap, and Turner often earned only two shillings a night, and in today's parlance, he was a veritable "fine art brick mover."
But Turner was happy to do it, because he especially liked to observe and depict the light and color of nature, and over time, this hand-moving brick work was actually famous for his painting, and everyone in the British painting circle knew that a young man named Turner was a good hand at painting background, so his business became more and more.
In 1796, Turner, who had accumulated a certain wealth and fame, finally created his first oil painting in his life, "Fishermen at Sea".
From this painting, we can see that Turner still seems to continue the style of the odd jobs for others, in which he depicts a magnificent and vast landscape, while the figures in the painting (the fisherman on the sea) are small in the painting, at sea at the mercy of fate.
This proportion of figures and landscapes is common in Chinese landscape painting, but it was rare in Europe at that time, and Europe, which was experiencing the Age of Enlightenment, was very confident and believed that human beings could dominate fate and all things. So Turner's landscape paintings are seen as particularly unique and avant-garde, and those who like him can taste the unique meaning of it, while those who dislike him say that his works are "empty".
Rome from the Vatican
And Turner was particularly fond of depicting disasters, depicting the smallness of humanity in disasters, which many Westerners were not accustomed to at the time, because in their religious conception, the coming of disaster must be meaningful, and in the Bible God destroyed the city of Sodom because there were no ten righteous people in that city. And the storms, thunderstorms, and fires that Turner likes to depict do not have a strong religious allegory, but always have an oriental sense of unspeakable uncertainty.
The Fire at the Parliament Building
This concept is also too advanced for the West, and the criticism of the "emptiness" of his paintings is not only for the paintings themselves, but also from the perspective of allegory.
It is conceivable that if the times continue to develop in this way, Turner may be a painter who is not understood by the mainstream for a long time, and even like Van Gogh and Miller, they will wait for artistic acquaintances long after their deaths.
But the twist of fate came suddenly and unexpectedly— because of a catastrophe that changed the history of the world.
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On April 5, 1815, in Batavia (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia), the capital of the Dutch East Indies, the soldiers suddenly heard a continuous rumbling noise in the distance, and the people of Batavia were so alarmed that they thought it was the sound of cannons, and the governor immediately ordered the reinforcement of the guard. By April 10, they had not seen half an enemy, but they had seen a pillar of fire rising from the east.
It turned out that since five days ago, Mount Tambora, which is more than 1,200 kilometers away, has entered a "full eruption mode", reaching a total climax on April 10. According to later estimates, the smoke column that erupted at that time may have been as high as 30 kilometers, and the entire volcano was almost completely reduced to a fiery fire.
"Eruption of Mount Vesuvius" by Turner
The violent eruption spewed out a total of about 140 million tons of lava and ash, and the original 4300-meter-high Tambora volcano was erupted for more than 1,000 meters. This is the world's largest volcanic eruption since recent scientific observations, and its eruption level has reached an extremely rare level of 7.
Batavia did not receive a direct report of the volcano because the inhabitants of the vicinity who could witness the eruption within a dozen kilometers of the eruption were killed after the eruption. Ash destroyed arable land, forests and water sources, and in the months that followed, more than 80,000 people died of famine and disease.
But the effects of this volcanic activity go far beyond that.
Turner's "Battlefield of Waterloo", the dark sky in the picture, is believed to come from the gloomy days in Europe caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora. The battle that ultimately led to Napoleon's defeat took place in June 1815, during the eruption of Mount Tambora. It is said that an important reason for Napoleon's defeat was that the damp ground caused by the haze made it impossible for Napoleon's good artillery to unfold... If that's the case, it's really a creation.
The year after the eruption, in 1816, people as far away as Europe were surprised to find that the sky began to take on a bright and eerie orange-red color, as if a layer of fog was always drifting in the distance. The British call this strange scenery "dry fog" and think that a heavy rain may wash it away. But strangely, after each heavy rain, this fog does not dissipate, but it will make people feel clearer and thicker.
The Chichester Canal, Turner
It took more than a hundred years for scholars to reveal what was going on, when the super-eruption of Mount Tambora sent sulfates from the ash into the stratosphere, which formed aerosols that enveloped the entire stratosphere with atmospheric circulation and could not be washed away by rainwater in the troposphere. So in the years that followed, the sky around the world appeared in the eyes of people from time to time this strange and brilliant orange-red color.
And the volcano to the world, not only this strange scene, because the volcanic ash obscured the sun, the global climate has abnormally cooled, Europe, Asia and North America temperate regions of the people are horrified to find that after June, July and August, the hot summer has not arrived, Europe rainy continuously, the northeast of the United States even snowed, the river froze.
The year 1816 is therefore known in history as the "Year without Summer". This year's climate change has had a profound impact on people around the world.
In Europe, 200,000 people starved to death in the years that followed due to food shortages, "food riots" occurred in almost every country, and the social order that had just been restored from the Napoleonic Wars was once again on the verge of collapse, which historians called "the worst existential crisis in the Western world". Starved by the starvation of the underprivileged people, they went on strikes, rallies, marches, and even staged coups. In 1819, there was the "Petrlu Massacre" in Britain, and in 1825, there was a Decembrist uprising in Tsarist Russia.
The crisis changed the world, governments had to make more concessions of power to the populace, and the French Revolution became far-reaching instead of an accident that disturbed the nobles' meals.
In the Americas, the population fleeing from Europe from hunger has surged. But the grain failure also lost their foothold in the eastern United States, so people began to migrate to the western United States, and the consequent western frontier supported the volume necessary for the United States to become the world's first power today.
In China, the sudden cooling has left the land barren, the rich Jiangnan region has a depressed scene, and Yunnan even has a "famine of the years, the road is dead." "The Jiaqing disaster, the national rice price rose, and the poor people sold their children and daughters. The prosperous scene that Kang Qian had painstakingly maintained since the Great Qing Dynasty finally could not hold up. The famine also affected the state of mind of the Jiaqing Emperor, who was now in his twilight years, and the further sharpening of social contradictions made him even more afraid to try reforms, and he wrote the "Theory of Shoucheng", where the rigid temperament of the late Qing China was completely fixed.
In short, for better or worse, that volcanic eruption in 1815 changed the whole world. And there is one person whose artistic career has also been transformed by this great change, and he is Turner.
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As we said earlier, before 1816, Turner's landscape paintings were not recognized by many people, and many painters laughed at him. In the final analysis, Europeans after the Age of Enlightenment were not accustomed to or had no way of perceiving the fragility and insignificance of human beings in the face of natural might, as embodied in The Fisherman of the Sea.
But after a strange summerless year, this mentality began to change quietly, and more and more people began to understand Turner, the grand, vast landscape he depicted, and the small human beings in it.
Slave Ship
Turner is using his magnificent mountains, seas, rainstorms, thunderstorms, and fires to tell the world: All things are fleeting, and nothing can be immortalized.
And the British, who have experienced the double changes of the climate and the industrial revolution, have also begun to reach a wonderful fit with this mood of the painter.
Years later, the writer Dickens will, in his novels, belatedly summarize the mood of the people living in this great age: "This is the best of times, and it is also the worst of times; this is an age of wisdom, this is an age of stupidity; this is a period of trust, this is a period of doubt." This is a season of light, this is a season of darkness; this is the spring of hope, this is the winter of disappointment; there is everything before people, there is nothing in front of people; people are on the way to heaven, people are going to the gates of hell. ”
The Decline and Fall of Carthage
And before such a summary comes, what can soothe people's wandering, small hearts in the torrent of the times? Go see one of Turner's paintings!
As a result, Turner became the most famous British painter of that era. Inspired by the "dry fog", Turner's paintings also increasingly show the eerie and brilliant colors that are unique to the sky of that era. He plucked gold and orange from the sky and spread them unrestrainedly throughout the canvas.
But strangely enough, throughout the era, Turner's paintings, although more depictive of dusk and disaster, often give people a strange sense of tranquility, as if even the most tragic catastrophes can occur with great tranquility.
This feeling, of course, is related to the warm tones that Turner uses to reflect the "dry fog", but more importantly, in order to better reflect the light and color of nature, Turner at this time even began to gradually abandon the clear outline of the object, so that everything on the canvas became blurry and hazy.
Hannibal's Crossing the Alps
Like connoisseur commentary, Turner's canvas is a "hazy sense of destiny"—you can't see exactly what the waves of the times are in front of you, but you know it's about to change your life.
In Turner's pen, fate is so turbulent, unreasonably attacking you, destroying you, or accomplishing you, what does it have to do with you?
But that doesn't mean that Turner is a man who chooses to lie flat on the times, and after he became famous, he was asked what the secret of his success in painting was, and Turner said, "The secret is to be diligent, to be diligent and diligent, and then to leave the rest to God." ”
In Chinese words, it is "do your best and obey the destiny." ”
In this way, even if "I am also killed by heaven", you can also say with satisfaction that "it is not a crime of war." “
War: Exiles and Stone Shells
Yes, combing through Turner's life, you will find that his life is a wonderful coupling of necessity and chance: without the volcanic eruption that shook the world and the ensuing summerless year, Turner's landscape paintings may not be as well-known as later generations, and this innovative painter may need to walk longer in the confusion and criticism of the times, and even a lifetime will not wait for the recognition of the times.
But Turner's efforts, his preference for light and color in nature, were not prepared for this sudden change, and without this change, he would have painted—honest painting, hard work, persistent painting, whether the era of understanding him would come tomorrow or a hundred years later.
He just tries, tries, tries again, and then gives his undetermined future to fate, to time.
Dido Builds Carthage
I also wanted to answer some questions from friends when I wrote this article. Recently, a lot of news, let us feel more and more that a big era is coming, the continuation of the epidemic, the inflection point of the population, the slowdown of growth, many people are very anxious, many articles have made various analysis and predictions.
But looking back at history we can see. In fact, the real grand change, its face is often vague, its impact is complex and difficult to see. Like the fiery fires and sweeping waves in Turner's paintings, you are not only unable to hide, but also unguessable.
In the face of such great changes, human beings can really do very little, and we are as small as a lonely boat in the Han Sea. But that doesn't mean we should be depressed — like Turner's fisherman, who lets the waves be terrible, but still paddles, like Turner's Hannibal, who lets the mountains stand tall, but still wants to climb it.
Angels Standing in the Sunshine
Yes, man is small, and in the face of the grand destiny of the times or the great power of nature, we actually have nothing to do. But this still does not negate the glory of mankind, for opportunity favors only those who are as prepared as Turner. For them, even a disaster can be another opportunity.
The volcano has erupted,
The times are coming,
But, leave him alone.
May we all be that Turner,
In turbulent times and wandering life,
Paint that golden glow of your own.
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