Debussy's Concept of the Dream

Abstract

In his study of Turner's great picture of the sea, The Snowstorm, Sir Kenneth Clark draws attention to Turner's preoccupation with ‘visions’ and ‘dreams’. These words, he says, ‘were commonly applied to Turner's pictures in his own day, and in the vague, metaphysical sense of the nineteenth century they have lost their value for us. But with our new knowledge of dreams as the expression of deep intuitions and buried memories, we can look at Turner's work again and recognise that to an extent unique in art his pictures have the quality of a dream. The crazy perspectives, the double focuses, the melting of one form into another and the general feeling of instability, all these are forms of perception which most of us know only when we are asleep. Turner experienced them when he was awake’.