The 1838 Flood in Pest Johann Mathias Ranftl

Numerous contemporary artists produced depictions of the 1838 flood in Pest, which claimed a great many lives and caused substantial material damage. Johann Matthias Ranftl of Vienna – in collaboration with Karl Klette – produced a series of ten drawings of the incident, which were then reproduced as lithographs. One of these drawings probably served as the inspiration for Ranftl’s 1839 painting. The towers of what is presumably the Józsefváros church can be seen in the background, suggesting that the artist has placed the scene in the part of the city worst affected by the flood. The raft, set diagonally across the pictorial space, and the gestures of the figures arranged in a triangular composition, suggest the influence not only of Peter Fendi’s depiction of the 1830 flood in Vienna (1830, Vienna, Wien Museum) but also, perhaps, of the period’s most iconic painting of a catastrophic event – Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819, Paris, Musée du Louvre). Like its antecedents, Ranftl’s painting is both the documentation of a contemporary event and, at the same time, a historical work that exploits the visual tropes of academic painting.

Dominika Sodics