Accretionary Wedge #10: Geology in Art – Glen Tilt

Map, Glen Tilt, Tayside by John Clerk of Eldin. Image source: USGS

John Van Hoesen over at Geological Musings in the Taconic Mountains is hosting Accretionary Wedge #10 on the subject of Geology in Art. Despite the vast potential of the field I’ve been having a few problems with this, largely because I’m a cultural Philistine and have a limited grounding in art and literature, but also because John has requested that we try to dig up as much background as possible on the origin of the work and possible influences on the artist.

First a few runners-up. From my seismology background, I had thought of discussing an earthquake related picture. A couple of choices I initially though of were images from the Lisbon 1755 or Calabrian 1783 earthquakes.

Images source: Courtesy of the National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering, EERC, University of California, Berkeley.

Two problems with these are that first the artists are unknown so discussion of their motivation is not possible and second, higher resolution versions of these images now appear to reside behind NISEE’s paywall so I can’t use them anyway due to copyright issues.

I also thought about using one of JMW Turner’s paintings such as The Fighting Temeraire as the sunsets are said to be influenced by those created by Tambora’s 1815 eruption.

Source: Public Domain

However, it isn’t directly geology, I don’t know Turner’s motivation and Thermochronic at Apparent Dip has already previous blogged about Tambora and art.

So, to John Clerk of Eldin’s watercolour of Map, Glen Tilt, Tayside. It may not be ‘mainstream’ art, but I like it as a picture and here, at least, I can find some background.

John Clerk of Eldin (1728 – 1812) was an amateur artist and great friend of James Hutton. He accompanied Hutton when he visited Glen Tilt, in the Cairngorm Mountains of northern Perthshire, Scotland in 1785 and provided illustrations for him. The watercolour depicts (Caledonian) granite (in pink) intruding (Dalradian) meta-sedimentary limestone layers and mica-schists.

The prevailing theory of Neptunism at the time stated that all rocks were precipitated in water, and linked with Noah’s flood and a short Earth history. Hutton wrote: “the granite is here found breaking and displacing the strata in every conceivable manner, including the fragments of the broken strata, and interjected in every possible direction among the strata which appear”. He realised here were limestones, precipitated in water, being intruded by something that had to have been molten at the time, and younger than the ‘flood’ limestones. The sudden realisation that this showed evidence of event sequences, a cyclic, steady state for the Earth and the potential of ‘deep geological time’ made him so excited that his guides thought he had discovered silver or gold.

However, Hutton’s discoveries at Glen Tilt were only published a hundred years after his death when a manuscript for the third edition of his Theory of the Earth was discovered and published by the Geological Society of London.

Sources:
BBC
Gazetteer for Scotland
Great Geological Controversies, Hallam A, 1989
Scottish Geology
Wikipedia

~ by hypocentre on June 7, 2008.