The Angel Standing in the Sun

An angel from the end of the book

The figure named here does not come from the Nativity, the Annunciation or any of the episodes that produced most of Western painting's angels. It belongs to the apocalyptic register — the angel standing in the sun, from the visions at the close of the New Testament. That places it outside the domestic scale of the messenger and the guide, and outside the nine ranks as well: apocalyptic angels are described by position and by act, never by order.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1846 and gives J.M.W. Turner, a British painter, with the style term Romanticism. The recorded dimensions are 79 x 79 cm — square, by the record's own numbers — and the measured colour family is ochre. The recorded location is Tate, London. The record's only subject filing for this entry is abstraction, which is a striking classification for a picture whose title names a figure.

Light as the subject

A great many angels in this catalogue are identified by what they carry. This one is identified by where it stands. That is a different kind of iconography, and it suits a painter whose recorded style term is Romanticism: an angel located in the sun is a figure that can only be described through light, and any picture of it has to make the light do the identifying.