Jonah Cast Forth by the Whale
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Jonah 2:10
The passage
And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.
Jonah 2:10
About this plate
Heavy sea, low cloud, a wall of dark water on the left. The whale is a mass in the swell with its tail up, and Jonah is on the rock at the right, on his hands and knees, having just arrived. He is very small.
Doré has made the weather the subject. Two thirds of this plate is water and sky worked in fine parallel lines, and the storm is not over — the sea is still running, and the man on the rock has been put down in the middle of it rather than rescued from it.
The verse is one sentence and it is nearly comic in its flatness. The LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land. No thanksgiving, no witnesses, no scene. God speaks to a fish, and the fish is sick.
Doré declines to make it grand. He draws no halo, no beam of light, no gesture from the sky. Just a man on all fours on wet rock, and an animal leaving, and the weather carrying on exactly as it was. The next verse has the word of the Lord come to him a second time. Nothing in this picture suggests he is ready for it.
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