he fact that situations as apparently different as shipwreck and
the destruction of Pompeii can share a common structure in part
explains how artists and writers could use them as equivalents
for each other. Obviously, many artists, such as Turner, Martin,
Coleman, and Miller, who found themselves attracted to a
particular kind of crisis-subject painted others as well. Thus,
James Hamilton, who painted The Last Days of Pompeii, also
created a powerful image of the imperiled ship in Old Ironsides
(1863, Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts), and similarly,
Johann (or Jens) Christian Dahl, a Norwegian landscapist,
painted both the powerful Shipwreck on the Coast of Norway
(1832, National Gallery, Oslo, Pl. 4) and Eruption of Vesuvius
(c. 1823, National Gallery, Oslo), as well as numerous other
first-hand studies of the volcano. Turner, a great master of
scenes of shipwreck and other natural disasters, also painted a
Vesuvius in Eruption (1817, Yale Center for British Art, New
Haven). Of course, the fact that a