And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were in It

And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were in It is Leighton's most explicitly apocalyptic painting, drawing its title directly from the Book of Revelation (20:13). The subject — the ocean releasing its dead at the Last Judgment — gave Leighton an opportunity to paint the human figure in extremis, bodies emerging from water in attitudes of awakening, confusion, and revelation. The painting belongs to the National Gallery and represents Leighton's engagement with the grand moral and spiritual subjects that his classical training demanded he address alongside the sensuous mythological works for which he was better known. The year 1800 in the database appears to be an erroneous date — the work was exhibited in the 1890s and represents his late style. Leighton was President of the Royal Academy and expected to embody the ambitions of official British painting; a subject of this gravity was appropriate to his public role.

The composition requires Leighton to orchestrate multiple figures in dynamic relationship — the rising dead presented in varied attitudes, their bodies both constrained by their recent state and animated by their awakening. His training in classical sculpture gives the figures anatomical authority. The handling of water and emerging bodies — the boundary between marine and air — is a significant technical challenge that his years of figure painting equipped him to address.