A Coast Scene, Ireland: Storm Effect

A Coast Scene, Ireland: Storm Effect, painted on panel in 1874 and held at Leighton House, represents a departure from Leighton's characteristic Mediterranean subjects into the drama of the northern Atlantic seaboard. Leighton made extended journeys through Britain and Ireland as well as the eastern Mediterranean, and Ireland's Atlantic coastline — dramatic basalt cliffs, stormy seas, low cloud — offered visual material quite different from the warm light and ancient monuments he favoured in his Italian and Middle Eastern work. Storm effect pictures were a well-established genre in nineteenth-century British landscape painting, drawing on the tradition of Turner and Constable and appealing to Romantic conceptions of the sublime. Leighton's treatment of the Irish coast reflects his range as a painter across widely different climatic and geographic conditions, demonstrating that his skills extended well beyond the classical figure subjects for which he was primarily known.

The panel support suits the compact, intense observation of a landscape study made under specific meteorological conditions. Leighton's handling of storm light — diffused, dramatically directional, with fast-moving cloud shadows — requires rapid, decisive brushwork quite different from his studio-composed figure paintings. The palette is restricted to the cool greys, greens, and whites of an Atlantic storm scene.