Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps

exhibited 1812

Oil on canvas, 146 × 237.5 cm. Tate Britain, London

A dark storm cloud curls over the Carthaginian army as it struggles through a mountain pass. The soldiers are tiny, and the weather, not the general, fills most of the canvas.

At the Royal Academy the painter insisted it hang low on the wall and threatened to withdraw it otherwise.
Look at the small orange sun, caught inside the dark arc of cloud.
The catalogue carried verses credited to his own poem Fallacies of Hope, the first time he did this; the poem was probably never finished.
Here the sublime comes from weather, a force no general can command or escape. Critics at the exhibition already praised the picture in exactly those terms.
Part of the Turner Bequest, the paintings he left to the nation, accepted in 1856; at Tate since 1910.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain (PD-Art)