The Tenth Plague of Egypt

Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1802, The Tenth Plague of Egypt marked Turner's bid to compete with the grandest tradition of biblical history painting. The subject — the death of the firstborn, the most devastating of the plagues visited upon Egypt — demanded monumental architecture, darkness broken by divine light, and figures rendered helpless before God's judgment. Turner's painting drew directly on his growing study of John Martin, who would soon make such apocalyptic subjects his speciality, and on the tradition of Poussin's plague paintings that had influenced a century of French and British artists. The Egyptian setting allowed Turner to deploy vast architectural forms — pylons, sphinxes, obelisks — as symbols of a civilization's futile power against divine will. The scale of the canvas, over two metres tall, announced Turner's determination that landscape painting could carry the gravitas of religious history. Ruskin later identified this work as one of the key steps in Turner's development of the sublime as a pictorial mode, building toward the cosmic ambitions of his mature career.

The dramatic composition uses vast, dark architectural forms and a turbulent sky to create an atmosphere of divine terror. Turner's rendering of the supernatural darkness and the architectural scale demonstrates his early mastery of the sublime in landscape painting.