Abstract

This paper explores and provides the context for a painting by John Webber, who accompanied James Cook on his third voyage of discovery to the Pacific: A Party from His Majesty’s Ship Resolution Shooting Sea Horses (1784). While the painting depicts the slaughter of walruses by Cook’s sailors in a cold Arctic environment, a case is made for the employment of tropes of the philosophical concept of the sublime on Webber’s part, and an empathetic response to the condition and plight of the animals depicted. This, it is argued, is part of the wider eighteenth-century ‘animal turn’, where ‘new sensibilities’ in British culture developed a conception of animals as an appropriate object of human sympathy by observing their capacity to suffer. The paper ends by proposing that Webber’s depiction of this scene might today be comprehended as an example of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of becoming-animal.

 

Keywords: Walrus, John Webber, James Cook, Arctic, the Sublime, sympathy, 'animal turn', 'becoming-animal'

How to Cite:

Simmons, L., (2026) “The Walrus and the Sublime in a Painting by John Webber”, Animal Studies Journal 15(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.14453/asj.1872