The Iron-Willed Challenger (PEMN)

Your sense of beauty

The fury of a storm bearing down at overwhelming scale, the surging sound pressure of an enormous orchestra. What draws you is the violent, immense energy of nature and of life, beyond anything small human calculation can reach. However critics at the premiere may have mocked it as "like film music" or as "soapsuds and whitewash," you hold deep respect for work of strong conviction that refused every compromise in defense of its own truth of beauty. You are certain that the beauty which shakes the soul lives inside a terrible dynamism that destroys safe harmony and tidy frames and threatens to swallow the viewer whole.

What moves you

Looking at a painting where a swirling blizzard and raging waves fuse on the canvas until the vast power of nature seems about to swallow you. Or the shock of the moment an orchestra of more than a hundred lets out a roar like thunder and the whole hall shakes.

The beauty you tend to overlook

A small quiet corner of a room, or the beauty of a delicate empty space that asserts little. Step a little away from immense scale and listen for the small events that stand quietly by, and a new breadth opens in your sensibility.

The composer in tune with you: Richard Strauss

Strauss extended the limits of descriptive music, drawing the violence of nature with an enormous orchestra in works such as An Alpine Symphony; at the time, opinion divided sharply, with some deriding it as "like film music." Music that draws everything from the coming of a fierce storm to an overwhelming sunrise in vast sound resonates strongly with a sense of beauty that asks for scale beyond the standard and a strong will.

The painter who resonates with you: J. M. W. Turner

In painting Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, Turner is said to have told others that he asked the sailors to lash him to the mast so that he could observe the storm (Tate states that this cannot be corroborated). At the time, one critic mocked the painting as "soapsuds and whitewash." On the surface, swirling light and atmosphere dissolve every outline and the terrible energy of nature explodes. A picture that drew vast light and storm to the end without yielding to harsh criticism resonates strongly with your sensibility.

What links the two

There is no historical connection between the two. But they share an aesthetic of the sublime: expressing, without fear of public criticism, the vast power of nature and the energy of the storm at overwhelming scale.

Three paintings for you

The Fighting Temeraire

J. M. W. Turner