Seascape and Deluge (from Sketchbook VII) 1886

Curator: Instantly, I feel a somber quiet about this scene. Like a charcoal memory, soft lines defining water against an impending storm. Editor: Indeed! What you're sensing is wonderfully captured in William Trost Richards' print "Seascape and Deluge (from Sketchbook VII)", dating back to 1886. He rendered it using printmaking techniques, currently hosted at the Metropolitan Museum. Curator: Richards! It has such movement. Even the hatching almost swirls into a dark horizon. What did seascapes symbolize in the Victorian Era? All that raw sublime energy… were people threatened or awed by it? Editor: I suspect both! On one hand, you have the Romantics who saw it as divine, a symbol of untamed freedom... The ocean, a border and connector to a globalized society. For Victorian society in general, it embodied industrial progress in maritime engineering. But here, the "deluge" suggests impending danger, something overpowering on the horizon... Maybe that looming sense of change. Curator: Oh! Like nature foreshadowing social or political unrest. Perhaps this recalls biblical events but feels so much closer. I'm especially curious about its repetitive hatch marks - creating the depth in those threatening clouds - a physical embodiment of apprehension perhaps? It isn't easy on the eye, or intended to be. Editor: Richards created several similar drawings using the same material. Do you think they are records of transient, physical reality, or personal, existential realities? The artist may have wanted it to stand for something. Curator: Both, maybe. But to me, it feels more personal, as though sketching raw human experience onto paper. I will certainly pause and remember this one. Editor: An emotional seascape indeed! Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I'll consider your insight as I ponder the historical context myself.