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The Assuaging of the Waters
Artwork Viewer
A biblical narrative presented in the guise of a seascape, this turbulent scene was the concluding image in a trilogy of paintings depicting episodes of the flood recounted in Genesis. Noah’s ark appears miniscule on the horizon, emphasizing the infinitesimal scale of human life on this remade planet. Martin achieved the visionary quality of the painting in part through the impossible viewpoint, situating the viewer on land just reclaimed from the floodwaters. As the ocean recedes, we witness the earth’s surface freshly composed of an assortment of watery and rocky elements, accentuated by Martin’s idiosyncratic application of oil paint, alternatingly fluid and pebbly.
The flood had followed God’s decision to cleanse human sinfulness from the earth, and this metaphysical drama plays out symbolically in the painting’s foreground. The dove will return to the ark having plucked an olive branch as proof of dry land. While Genesis does not comment on the raven’s fate, Martin imagines the bird standing over a drowned serpent, alluding to the triumph over Satan and sin. The marine life, however, reveals Martin at his most ingenious. He had a strong inclination toward science and engineering, and his depiction of the spiral-shelled argonaut incorporates a recent biological discovery into this scene of primordial rebirth. In 1839, the London Zoological Society confirmed Jeanne Villepreaux-Powers’s findings that the argonaut did, in fact, produce its own shell, or egg case, with the two sail-like arms that Martin accentuates in his depiction of it. Even as early paleontologists in England were looking to the fossil record to establish Earth’s age, Martin found a metaphor for Noah’s construction of the ark and the safe passage of his family in the burgeoning field of marine biology.
- Artist
- John Martin
- Title
- The Assuaging of the Waters
- Date
- 1840
- Place of Creation
- England
- Object Type
- Painting
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 56 1/2 x 86 1/4 in. (143.5 x 219.1 cm)
- Credit Line
- Museum purchase, Whitney Warren Jr. Bequest Fund in memory of Mrs. Adolph B. Spreckels
- Accession Number
- 1989.73
