Two Winds

A wind blows across West’s picture from behind the burning city, carrying the fire-streaks, the far palms, the grass and Lot’s wife’s mantle to the right. One tree bows against it, back towards Sodom, and so does one woman. The picture’s subject is the pull of the thing you were told not to look at, and the two open hands that pull the other way.

Two Palms

At the far left of the panel, in front of the burning city, a clump of palm fronds is blown to the viewer’s right, towards the flames. Two-thirds of the way across, behind the fleeing family, a single tall palm leans the other way, its crown streaming to the viewer’s left — also towards the flames. No natural wind bends two trees towards each other, and the picture says which is lying. The streaks of fire lean to the right as they fall; the town’s smoke drifts up to the right; the trees behind the shore and the grass tufts in the lower right corner stream right; so does the mantle of Lot’s wife. There is one wind, and it blows from behind Sodom across the whole panel. The far palm merely bends with it. The tall palm, the one tree standing over the family, bends against it, back towards the city — and so, with her whole body, does Lot’s wife.

That is the picture’s argument, and it runs against the received description, William Carey’s of 1819, written for the picture’s owner and followed since, my own first attempt included. On three points, the sun, a hand and a goblet, the picture says something else.

The Picture

The image used for looking is a photograph supplied, 4460 by 2683 pixels, which shows the whole painted surface down to the signature; the museum’s own zoomable image could not be reached. The reproduction reads warm, which may be the varnish rather than the file. Positions are the viewer’s; a figure’s limbs are its own (“his own right hand”).

Rather more than a third of the panel is sky, and the sky is smoke: umber-brown masses rolling up from a conflagration in the upper left-centre, a great incandescent cloud, cream-white at its heart, pink and apricot at its edges, with a rounded lobe of lit cloud bulging at its lower right. Out of it fall streaks of fire, parallel strokes of orange and yellow that lean to the right as they descend, from upper left to lower right — a curtain of long streaks hanging over the city at the left, whose foot reaches the burning shore, and a rain of shorter ones nearer the centre; a darker veil of smoke hangs between fire and town. A dozen or so sharp flecks of orange are scattered through the smoke. To the right the smoke thins to a grey-blue that never becomes sky. There is no blue anywhere in this picture.

Low on the left horizon, about a tenth of the way across, sits a small white disc. Its lower part is cut off by the horizon; roughly half of it shows, and a thin grey thread of cloud crosses its upper edge. Carey wrote that “a lurid cloud overshadows one half of the sun, just above the horizon”.¹ The disc is half-risen, not half-veiled: the horizon takes the bottom of it and the cloud is a hair across the top. Genesis is explicit — “The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar” (19:23), one of seven verses the Academy printed under the title in 1811.² It is white and throws no rays; Carey called it the sun, and the verse agrees.

Beside and beneath it lies the city: a strip of pale buildings along a shore, one tall square tower with two dark openings and its right flank lit pale yellow, and along the whole waterfront a line of orange-yellow flame with white flashes in it. Between the city and us is a sheet of grey-green water.

The family crosses a patch of lit yellow-green grass at the centre, moving right, their shadows falling to the right: the light on them comes from the left, where the sun and the fire both are. West has put the sunrise and the judgement on the same side, and on the fleeing bodies the two lights cannot be told apart.

Lot’s wife is the rearmost figure, on her own. We see her from behind. Her head, hooded in the same orange-red as her mantle, is turned away from us; no profile shows and her face is invisible. Both arms are raised — since we see her back, the arm straight up on the viewer’s left is her own left, the arm flung out to the viewer’s right her own right — and both hands are open, fingers spread. The mantle streams away to the right in one long trailing fold over a cream gown — with the wind, as the fire-streaks and the grass do — and below it her own left foot, in a sandal, is already stepping to the left, toes towards the city, the other leg trailing. Read the foot: she is not standing to look. She is stepping back towards Sodom, against the wind that streams her mantle out.

Ahead of her, the group of five. The white angel is nearest us, striding right, seen from behind, his head turned so far to the right that only the edge of the face shows: short dark curls, a white tunic to the knee whose skirt flies out behind him to the left, a golden-ochre sash hanging between his legs, one leg stretched back with a bare foot, the forward foot apparently sandalled. One wing is spread wide up and back to the upper left, the second overlapping it lower and mostly hidden; the white cloth flying low behind his legs is that skirt, not a wing. His own right arm — the one on the viewer’s right, since we see his back — reaches forward across the front of the nearer daughter at the height of her chest and ends in an open hand, palm towards us, fingers spread and raised, held up beside the second daughter’s chin and just short of Lot’s red mantle. It touches nobody: the open hand of speech, aimed at the daughters. His own left arm cannot be seen.

The nearer daughter walks in profile, face turned right and down, a yellow cloth on her head and on it a large orange-red bundle, rounded and tied, which she steadies with one raised arm, the only one of hers that can be seen. The second daughter walks behind and to the right of her: reddish-brown hair under a grey-blue striped band, face three-quarter and turned down, an olive-grey dress. One arm — which, her turn does not let me say — hangs straight down, and from the hand at hip level hangs a dark object: near-black, bulbous, narrow-necked, with one white highlight, gripped by the neck. It reads as a flask or bottle; it could be a soft bag; it cannot be resolved further at four times magnification. A sleeved forearm below the angel’s raised hand may be her other arm held across her body, or may not.

Lot walks between his daughters and the second angel, turned three-quarter towards us, head bowed: heavy dark brows, grey beard and moustache, a sallow face in the shadow of a hood, the hood and mantle the same orange-red as his wife’s, cream under-robe and sandals. His own right hand emerges from the mantle at his waist, fingers curled round a fold of the cloth — one of only two closed hands in the picture, the other being the daughter’s grip on the flask. His own left arm, wrapped in red, passes under the bent forearm of the angel beside him; a red end of cloth shows between that forearm and the angel’s chest, and Lot’s left hand itself is hidden.

The second angel, in a long golden-ochre robe with a darker olive mantle hanging from his own left shoulder, strides right at the head of the group with his chest turned towards us, and has turned his head back to Lot with a look of anxious urgency; nobody else in the group meets a look, and nobody but the wife has turned her whole body to the city. Because he faces us, the arm stretched straight out to the viewer’s right is his own left: hand open, fingers spread — an urging hand, not a pointing finger. Both white wings rise behind him. And at his chest, palm out, fingers up, is a second open hand, pale as his face, the ochre sleeve running from it down to a bent elbow: his own right. Carey read this hand as Lot’s — “one hand is under the arm of his heavenly Conductor, with its palm extended in awe”³ — and I repeated him. On the image the spread hand grows out of the angel’s own sleeve and has the angel’s skin: it is the angel’s own right hand, raised before his own breast, palm out, in the old gesture of assurance, while Lot’s arm passes under it and a red sleeve-end shows again beyond. The text is Genesis 19:16, “the men laid hold upon his hand”; West painted the laying-hold, then covered the hands with cloth. Three open palms on the angels, two flung open on the wife, and one fist, Lot’s, closed on his own cloak: the hands are the picture’s grammar.

To the right the ground rises in a pale sandy slope with a track winding up it into the trees, lit like the grass, with big rounded boulders and tufts of grass at its foot streaming right; the tall palm rises out of the bushes at the slope’s upper edge, bending left, with an orange-brown cluster under its crown that I take to be dates. Above it a blue-grey mountain, and above that, filling the upper right, a mass of dark trees, the foliage turning orange-yellow at the very edge — autumn or firelight, I cannot say. The lower left is a bank of shrubs sunk into near-black, with big dock-like leaves at the corner, a bare twisted tree against the water and, only in a brightened copy of the file and so uncertain, what looks like a fallen log with a glowing end. In the lower right corner, on the sand, is the signature, “B. West” over “1810”, worn, inside a drawn oval.

A fine network of cracks lies over the dark smoke at the upper left and, less visibly, over the burst, the wings and the path. And a thin, pale, slightly wavy horizontal line runs across the panel about a quarter of the way down, visible unaided in the grey sky at the right and continuing straight through the dark trees to the edge, traceable across the smoke in a contrast-enhanced copy. It is not a painted feature; it is almost certainly a join between the boards of the panel, or a crack along the grain — which brings us to what the picture is made of.

Making

The support is wood, unusual for a picture two metres wide in 1810 and for West, whose big late histories are on canvas. John Dillenberger’s plate caption calls it “Oil on mahogany panel”, the only source I have found that names the wood; the Detroit record and the catalogue raisonné say “panel”.⁴ Nothing has been published on the panel’s construction. What the photograph shows is a picture painted fast in its lit parts — the heart of the fire in loaded creamy strokes dragged sideways, the wings in thick dragged whites over grey, the burning waterfront in small crisp dabs — and thinly in its darks, where the smoke is scumbled over a warm ground that shows through everywhere.

A drawing for the figures, black and white chalk on blue paper, about 23 by 42 centimetres, “with a much less extensive landscape”, is at Vassar College.⁵ The group reads as a frieze, six figures on one shallow plane, with the landscape enlarged round it; that is why the family walks along the front of the picture rather than into it, with fire, sun and city arranged behind them like scenery.

The flames, Allen Staley writes, “stay well in the distance”, with “more in common with the theatrical effects of Philip James de Loutherbourg” than with Turner’s conflagrations; the picture is “inconceivable without the prior example of paintings of similar subjects exhibited by Turner between 1800 and 1810”, though its nearer relative is West’s own Tenth Plague of Egypt of 1802.⁶ It also applies, almost as a diagram, the rule West gave Farington in 1803, discussed in the earlier piece: Claude “for air”, Titian’s dark distances against light foregrounds.

No Commission

No one, so far as the record shows, ordered this picture. West painted it in 1810, in his seventy-second year, while the enormous Christ Healing the Sick was in the studio; Farington called on 15 March 1811 to see that canvas “finished a few days ago” and “also saw for the first time West’s picture of ‘Lot & His daughters retiring from Sodom,’—with which I was much struck.”⁷ Shown at the Academy that spring and at the British Institution in 1814, it was still West’s when, in January 1819, Sir John Fleming Leicester acquired it from John Wilson’s European Museum in King Street — a showroom that, the catalogue raisonné suggests, “probably had the painting on consignment from West rather than owning it himself”.⁸ Leicester paid partly in kind, returning a West bought the year before, The Destruction of the Beast and False Prophet, and adding a hundred guineas.⁹ The picture that finally sold was eight years old; Leicester hung it in his London gallery, where it is recognisable in the engraved frontispiece to Carey’s catalogue.¹⁰

The artist at this moment — the president at seventy-two, his pension gone, his chapel abandoned, painting to sell — was drawn in the earlier article. What matters here is that a man with no patron to please chose, on an expensive slab of wood, a subject that appears nowhere else in his work that I can find.

Reading

Genesis 19 gives a painter four moments and West took all of them. The angels “laid hold upon his hand” (v. 16); one says “Escape for thy life; look not behind thee … escape to the mountain” (v. 17); “The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar” as “the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire” (vv. 23–24); and “his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt” (v. 26). The laying-hold is the buried hand-hold under the ochre angel’s arm; “escape to the mountain” is the open hand pointing up the sandy track out of the plain — uphill, not towards Carey’s “sanctuary of Segor”;¹¹ sunrise and fire share the horizon; and the wife is caught in the verb “looked back”, half a verse before the noun “pillar” happens to her.

That last is West’s departure from a tradition worth naming. Rubens, in the picture at Sarasota and Vorsterman’s print after it, sends the family out of the gate with their goods — candlesticks under a daughter’s dress — and his wife walks with them, despondent, not yet turned.¹² Guido Reni’s Lot and his Daughters leaving Sodom in the National Gallery omits city, wife and angels altogether.¹³ Turner’s Destruction of Sodom, shown around 1805, has the wife already “being turned into a pillar of salt”; Corot’s, decades later, makes her a small white column in the distance.¹⁴ West’s wife is alive, in colour, larger than any of them, and moving. He keeps the goods — bundle on the head, flask in the hand — which are not in Genesis and come from the Rubens line, and he gives both angels work, one leading, one talking, as Rubens does.¹⁵

The bundle is the wealth of Sodom carried out of it, in the tradition a sign of attachment to what is being judged, and here it rides higher than any head in the group, a red weight the daughter is more anxious to steady than her father is. The flask I leave a flask; if a reader wants to see in it the wine of the cave (Gen. 19:32–35), the picture permits the thought and does not press it. The sun is the morning promised; the fire, the judgement; the mountain, safety; and the wife’s two open hands are Burke’s sublime given a body — astonishment, “that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror”.¹⁶ Carey’s moral is plain: the figure enforces “the necessity of persevering to the last in the path of obedience”.¹⁷

Beneath the Surface

The commentators had long since decided what Lot’s wife meant. For Philo she stands for the pupil who despises his teacher, “turns his head round so as to keep his eyes on what is behind him” and “becomes a pillar, like a lifeless and senseless stone”.¹⁸ For Origen she is the flesh looking back to pleasure; for Augustine she is turned to salt to give believers “a condiment by which to savor somewhat the warning to be drawn from that example”.¹⁹ Bereshit Rabbah explains the salt by a sin of salt: on the night the angels came she went round the neighbours asking for salt “as we have guests”, to betray them.²⁰ The Zohar reads “looked from behind him” as her seeing the Angel of Destruction, who does not destroy a person whose face he has not seen.²¹ None of this is on the panel; all of it is why a Regency viewer could watch a woman fling up her hands and feel a doctrine. West refuses them the punishment: his stepping woman is a temptation, not a lesson, placed so that the viewer, who is also looking at the burning city, shares her position.

One step further, signalled as speculation. Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia reads the chapter as the biography of a church: “look not back behind thee” means “that he should not look to doctrinal things”, the city is doctrine and the mountain love, and the rising sun “signifies the Lord’s presence itself” in “the last period, which is called the Judgment”.²² No evidence says West read the Arcana; the clearest documented bridge, Jacob Duché’s Swedenborgian circle, for whose Discourses of 1779 West designed a frontispiece engraved by William Sharp, leads to a milieu, not a text.²³ A picture in which the sun rises on the side of the judgement, and a family is led uphill away from a city, would have satisfied a Swedenborgian reader without any help from the painter.

What Isn’t There

There is no pillar of salt. The wife is flesh, colour and motion, and the picture stops half a verse short of her fate.

There is one city, not two. Gomorrah, named in Young’s title and Jerdan’s, is nowhere on the panel.

There is no goblet. Carey gave the daughter with the bundle “a goblet in her hand”; the only vessel is the dark, narrow-necked thing hanging by its neck from the other daughter’s own right hand, a flask or bottle before it is a cup.²⁴ My own earlier description made it a bag in her left hand: wrong hand, probably wrong object.

There is no “palm extended in awe” belonging to Lot. The spread hand at the ochre angel’s chest is the angel’s own right; Lot’s hands are a fist on his cloak and an arm buried under the angel’s. Describers from Carey to me gave the angel’s hand to the old man because the story said the old man should be in awe.

The white angel does not push the daughter. The earlier article had him driving her forward; the arm reaches across in front of her and opens into a speaking hand. He is talking to the daughter, as Carey in fact said.²⁵

The sun is not “overshadowed” for half its disc. It is half-risen, cut by the horizon, with a thread of cloud across its top.²⁶

There is no wind towards Sodom. The earlier article took the tall palm’s lean as the wind’s direction and the wife’s mantle as blown against it. The fire-streaks, the far-left palms, the grass at the lower right and the mantle itself all stream the other way: the wind blows from the left, and in the landscape the tall palm alone bows against it.

The 1827 sale catalogue has one angel and no daughters — “The angel conducting Lot and his wife out of the valley of Sodom … Very awfully treated” — and the garble has been repeated as if it described another picture.²⁷

And the museum’s record has two faults: its citation of Hazlitt’s Complete Works “18, pp. 113–134” points at essays on the fine arts and on James Barry; the notice of this picture is on pages 13–14 of that volume;²⁸ and it gives no exhibition history, though the picture was shown at the Academy in 1811, the British Institution in 1814 and Leicester’s gallery in 1819.²⁹

Afterlife

The Academy of 1811 received it well: Robert Hunt in the Examiner found “the magic powers of light, shade, colour, and form … combined with admirable skill to raise the emotions of terror”; the Monthly Magazine thought “this picture alone is sufficient for a splendid reputation.”³⁰,³¹ The catalogue raisonné’s judgement is that it “seems to have attracted little attention” that year and drew more notices at the British Institution in 1814. Hazlitt, in the Morning Chronicle of 5 February 1814, called it “one of those highly finished specimens of metallurgy which too often proceed from the President’s hardware manufactory”, and “a mere furniture picture”.³² Furniture it became. Five years later Carey, paid by its new owner, was calling its painter “the venerable founder of the British school of historical painting”; in 1821 John Young etched it for Leicester’s catalogue as “one of his happiest performances”; and the Examiner of 1826 praised its “elegant figures and a fine character of haste”.³³,³⁴,³⁵

Christie’s sold Leicester’s collection on 7 July 1827, and in the Getty Research Institute’s copy of the catalogue, annotated in brown ink, the annotator wrote against lot 45 “100” and, beneath the painter’s name, “Gallery at Manchester”. A hundred guineas is £105, the figure Redford’s Art Sales gives in 1888 with the buyer’s name “Jackson”, repeated by the catalogue raisonné; a Jackson owned the picture nearly eighty years later.³⁶,³⁷ Whether “Gallery at Manchester” means the Royal Manchester Institution, founded four years earlier, with a Jackson bidding for it, I cannot establish; it stays an open question. Two lines below it the annotator entered lot 46, Turner’s Dutch Fishing Boats, at 490 guineas, bought by “Turner”: the painter buying back his own picture at nearly five times the price of West’s.³⁸

It stayed with the Jacksons, it seems, until 1906, when Mrs Newton Jackson gave it to Radley College, the Oxfordshire school, “in memory of her son Leyton Thomas, who died in 1906”.³⁹ Where it hung and why it was sold I have not found; it came up at Phillips on 6 April 1970, went to the Leger Galleries, and was bought by Detroit the same year with Robert Tannahill’s money.⁴⁰ One consequence: Allen Staley, seeing the picture in 1975, found in it “the impetus to do more extended work on West” — work that became, eleven years later, the catalogue raisonné on which every sentence of this section depends.⁴¹

The Palms Again

Go back to the two trees. The far one, in front of the city, bends with the wind that carries the fire; the near one, standing over the family, bends against it, back towards the city they have left. Between them a woman in orange-red has turned and taken a step the same way, against the wind that streams her mantle out. West, not a subtle painter of wind, was a deliberate painter of direction: the whole landscape streams away from Sodom, and what leans back towards it is a tree, a wife, and the flying skirt of an angel running the other way. Against them, two open hands — one at the head of the road, one before the angel’s breast over an old man’s buried grip. Genesis says the angels laid hold of them. West says that hold is the only thing stronger than the pull of looking back.

Things You May Not Have Noticed

1. The sun is rising, not being hidden. The white disc at the left is cut below by the horizon, not above by cloud; Carey’s “lurid cloud overshadows one half of the sun” is what I repeated in the earlier piece. Genesis 19:23 — “the sun was risen upon the earth” — is one of the verses printed in the 1811 Academy catalogue.
2. The spread hand at the golden angel’s chest is the angel’s. It grows from his own ochre sleeve and has his skin; Lot’s hand is hidden under the angel’s arm. Carey gave the palm to Lot, “extended in awe”, and I followed him.
3. The two palms bow towards each other. The clump at the far left streams right with the wind that carries the fire-streaks and the town’s smoke; the tall palm behind the family bows left, against it, back towards the city — the only tree in the picture that does.
4. Lot’s wife is walking back, not standing. Her own left foot is already stepping to the left and her mantle streams behind her to the right; she is moving towards Sodom, still a woman, half a verse before she becomes salt.
5. The picture was part-paid for with another West. Sir John Leicester got it in January 1819 by returning The Destruction of the Beast and False Prophet, bought from West the year before, and adding 100 guineas (von Erffa & Staley).
6. Turner bought back his own picture on the same page of the 1827 sale. Lot 46, his Dutch Fishing Boats, went to “Turner” for 490 guineas; the West, lot 45, made 100. The Getty’s annotated catalogue also records against the West the words “Gallery at Manchester”, unexplained.
7. The wood is said to be mahogany. Dillenberger’s 1977 plate caption is the only published statement of it; a thin pale line a quarter of the way down the panel, running through sky and trees alike, is probably a board join.
8. The figures were drawn first with a much smaller landscape. A black-and-white chalk drawing for them on blue paper, about 23 × 42 cm, is at Vassar College.
9. A schoolboy’s memorial. From 1906 to 1970 the picture belonged to Radley College, given by Mrs Newton Jackson in memory of her son Leyton Thomas — the Jacksons having, on Redford’s evidence, bought it at the 1827 sale.
10. Carey wrote from a Catholic Bible. His “save thyself in the mountain” and “Segor” are the Douay-Rheims wording; the Academy’s catalogue used the Authorised Version’s “Zoar”.
11. The signature sits inside a drawn oval, lower right on the sand: “B. West / 1810”, the letters worn.
12. The picture made a West scholar. Allen Staley’s preface to the catalogue raisonné records that seeing this panel in 1975 gave him the impetus for the work that became the book.

Sources

Carey, William. A Descriptive Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings by British Artists, in the Possession of Sir John Fleming Leicester, Bart. London, 1819.

Christie’s. A Catalogue of the Very Choice Collection of Modern Pictures … of … Lord de Tabley. London, 7 July 1827. Getty Research Institute annotated copy.

Detroit Institute of Arts. Collection record, Lot Fleeing from Sodom, 70.831. https://dia.org/collection/lot-fleeing-sodom-64799.

Dillenberger, John. Benjamin West: The Context of His Life’s Work. San Antonio, 1977.

Farington, Joseph. The Farington Diary, ed. James Greig, vol. VI. London, 1926.

Hazlitt, William. Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, vol. XVIII. London, 1933.

[Hunt, Robert.] “Fine Arts. Royal Academy.” The Examiner, 5 May 1811.

The Monthly Magazine, vol. 31, no. 214, 1 July 1811.

Redford, George. Art Sales, vol. II. London, 1888.

Swedenborg, Emanuel. Arcana Coelestia, tr. J. F. Potts.

Von Erffa, Helmut, and Allen Staley. The Paintings of Benjamin West. New Haven and London, 1986. No. 238.

Young, John. A Catalogue of Pictures by British Artists, in the Possession of Sir John Fleming Leicester, Bart. London, 1821.

Not consulted (not accessible online): Douglas Hall, “The Tabley House Papers”, Walpole Society 38 (1962); Mary Black et al., American Paintings in the Detroit Institute of Arts, vol. I (1991), no. 112; the Phillips sale catalogue of 6 April 1970; any Radley College record; any technical report on the panel.