Page of Gordale Scar by WARD, James in the Web Gallery of Art, a searchable image collection and database of European paintings and sculptures (1100-1850)

Pixel Size(1030,816)

Gordale Scar

1811-13
Oil on canvas, 332 x 421 cm
Tate Gallery, London

James Ward tried to express his own emotionally charged faith through a masterpiece of natural observation, his gigantic Gordale Scar finished in 1813. Here the towering expanse of rock and thundering cataract, set beneath a stormy sky, takes on a symbolism of its own. The encircling amphitheatre of the Scar becomes a microcosm, and the beasts who graze or lock antlers before it - few of which had actually roamed there since much earlier times - emphasize its primordial state. The white bull who watches over them is probably a very contemporary mark of British resolve in the face of Napoleonic attack.