Beyond Titus; The Sea, The Sea

Rembrandt's The Artist's Son Titus strikes a remarkable figure. Unlike the scenes of wealth and status in many of the other portraits at the Wallace collection however, this figure is simply dressed, and the luxuriant landscapes of ancient Greece or Italy are instead replaced by a inky black, broken only by what appears to be the crashing waves of the sea.

The piercing gaze clearly had an effect on Iris Murdoch, whose magnum opus The Sea The Sea features a tragic figure whose fate is decided by the pulling tides. Indeed, the pathetic fallacy of sea links the elemental landscapes of a rocky shore, with the swirling consciousness of a murderous mind, acting as a mirror to the tumultuous developing plot. By using a wholly natural force to represent that of the workings of the mind of a man, Murdoch captures the power that perceptions of the natural world have on our emotional state.