Marine art

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Rembrandt's stolen masterpiece, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633).

Marine art or maritime art is a form of

inspiration from the sea. Maritime painting is a genre that depicts ships and the sea—a genre particularly strong from the 17th to 19th centuries.[1] In practice the term often covers art showing shipping on rivers and estuaries, beach scenes and all art showing boats, without any rigid distinction - for practical reasons subjects that can be drawn or painted from dry land in fact feature strongly in the genre.[2]
Strictly speaking "maritime art" should always include some element of human seafaring, whereas "marine art" would also include pure seascapes with no human element, though this distinction may not be observed in practice.

20th-century ukiyo-e print of Boats in Snow

Ships and boats have been included in art from almost the earliest times, but marine art only began to become a distinct genre, with specialized artists, towards the end of the

landscape art
emerged during the Renaissance, what might be called the marine landscape became a more important element in works, but pure seascapes were rare until later.

Willem van de Velde the Elder's The Capture of the Royal Prince during the Four Days' Battle, 1666.

Maritime art, especially marine painting – as a particular genre separate from

Romantic art
, the sea and the coast was reclaimed from the specialists by many landscape painters, and works including no vessels became common for the first time.

Earliest times to 1400

Gobustan
.

Vessels on the water have featured in art from the earliest times. The earliest known works are

Gobustan Petroglyph Reserve in modern Azerbaijan, which was then on the edge of the much larger Caspian Sea
. Rock carvings and carved objects depicting ships have been found on several islands of the Aegean (Andros, Naxos, Syros, Astypalaia, Santorini) as well as mainland Greece (Avlis), dating from 4,000 BCE onwards.

Both men and gods are shown on river "barges" in

Nile delta, and grave goods include detailed models of boats and their crews for use in the afterlife. The central cult image in Egyptian temples
was usually a small figure of the god, carried in a barge or "barque".

Attic red-figured stamnos
, c. 480-470 BC

Ships sometimes appear in

Ancient Roman painting, presumably drawing on Greek traditions, very often shows landscape views from the land across a lake or bay with distant land on the horizon, as in the famous "Ulysses" paintings in the Vatican Museums. The water is usually calm, and objects that are submerged, or partly so, may be shown through the water.[6] The large Nile mosaic of Palestrina
(1st century BCE) is a version of such compositions, with a view intended to show all the course of the river.

From

Old St Peter's in Rome, but such representations are of relatively little interest from the purely marine point of view.[8]

15th century

Vittore Carpaccio, Arrival of the Pilgrims in Cologne, 1490.

A distinct tradition begins to re-emerge in

books of hours by artists such as Simon Bening
.

During the

nautilus shell began to reach Europe, many used these for their hull, like the Burghley Nef of about 1528. Lower down the social scale, interest in shipping was reflected in many early prints of ships. The earliest are by Master W with the Key, who produced several engravings of ships; for some time such "ship portraits" were confined to prints and drawings, and typically showed the ship with no crew, even if under sail. They also usually anticipated the low horizon that painting would not achieve until the 17th century.[11] The first print of a naval battle is an enormous (548 x 800 mm) woodcut of the Battle of Zonchio in 1499 between the Venetians and the Turks. The only surviving impression is coloured with stencils; most were probably pasted onto walls.[12] The earliest comparable painting to survive comes from several decades later.[13]

At the same time artists were often involved in the expansion of Western

curvature of the Earth with a ship half-seen on the horizon. The many coastal views in the book's woodcuts are important in the development of such representations.[14] Birds-eye plans of cities, often coastal, which we would today usually consider as cartography, were often done by artists, and considered as much as works of art as maps by contemporaries.[15]

Italian Renaissance art showed maritime scenes when required, but apart from the Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio there were few artists in this or the next century who often returned to such scenes, or did so with special sensitivity. Carpaccio's scenes show Venetian canals or docksides; there are several arrivals and departures in his Legend of Saint Ursula. In the German-speaking lands, Konrad Witz's Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1444) is both the first landscape painting to show a recognisable rural location, and an atmospheric view across Lake Geneva
.

16th century

Peter Brueghel, Naval Battle in the Gulf of Naples, (The Harbour of Naples), c. 1558

The Netherlandish tradition of the "

Protestant Reformation greatly restricted the uses of religious art, accelerating to the development of other secular types of art in Protestant countries, including landscape art and secular forms of history painting
, which could both form part of marine art.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, now seen as a good early copy of Bruegel's original

An important work by a Flemish "follower of Patenir" is the Portuguese Carracks off a Rocky Coast of about 1540 (787 x 1447 mm), in the

Henry VIII embarking for the Field of the Cloth of Gold, which is typical in clearly showing the ships side-on, with no attempt to adjust for the high view point.[11]

The Embarkation of Henry VIII at Dover

A superb coloured drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger of a ship crowded with drunken lansquenets was perhaps done in preparation for a mural in London. This adopts the low viewpoint typical of the ship portrait.[18]

Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, Rome, and a small but dramatic late shipwreck scene. A larger storm scene in Vienna, once regarded as his, is now attributed to Joos de Momper.[2]
Such subjects were taken up by his successors, including his sons.

Storm c. 1568, now attributed to Joos de Momper.

The highly picturesque and historically useful

Henry VIII in the 1540s. However it is neither very visually accurate nor artistically accomplished, having perhaps been illustrated by the official concerned.[19] As in France, 16th-century English paintings of elaborate royal embarkations and similar occasions are formulaic, if often impressive. Most used Netherlandish artists, as did representations in prints of the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The Virgin of the Navigators is a Spanish work of the 1530s with a group of ships at anchor, presumably in the New World
, protected by the Virgin.

Mannerism in both Italy and the North began to paint fantastic tempests with gigantic waves and lightning-filled skies, which had not been attempted before but were to return into fashion at intervals over the following centuries. As naval warfare became more prominent from the late 16th century, there was an increased demand for works depicting it, which were to remain a staple of maritime painting until the 20th century, pulling the genre in the direction of history painting, with an emphasis on the correct and detailed depiction of the vessels, just as other trends pulled in the direction of increasingly illusionist and subtle effects in the treatment of the sea and weather, paralleling those of landscape painting. Many artists could paint both sorts of subject, but others specialized in one or the other. However at this date seascapes showing a large portion of sea and with no vessels at all were very rare.

Maritime painting of the Dutch Golden Age

Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom, 1617, Dutch Ships Ramming Spanish Galleys off the Flemish Coast in October 1602
Main article: Dutch Golden Age painting

The

Dutch navy at the peak of its glory, though today it is usually the "calms", or more tranquil scenes that are highly estimated. It is therefore no surprise that the genre of maritime painting was enormously popular in Dutch Golden Age painting, and taken to new heights in the period by Dutch artists.[21] As with landscapes, the move from the artificial elevated view typical of earlier marine painting to a low viewpoint was a crucial step, made by the first great Dutch marine specialist Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom.[22]

More often than not, even small ships fly the

Dutch tricolour, and many vessels can be identified as naval or one of the many other government ships. Many pictures included some land, with a beach or harbour viewpoint, or a view across an estuary. Other artists specialized in river scenes, from the small pictures of Salomon van Ruysdael with little boats and reed-banks to the large Italianate landscapes of Aelbert Cuyp, where the sun is usually setting over a wide river. The genre naturally shares much with landscape painting, and in developing the depiction of the sky the two went together; many landscape artists also painted beach and river scenes. Artists probably often had precise models of ships available to help them achieve accurate depictions.[23] Artists included Jan Porcellis, Simon de Vlieger, Jan van de Cappelle, and Hendrick Dubbels.[24]

Salomon van Ruysdael, typical View of Deventer Seen from the North-West (1657); an example of the "tonal phase".

The prolific workshop of Willem van de Velde the Elder and his son was the leader of the later decades, tending, as at the beginning of the century, to make the ship the subject, but incorporating the advances of the tonal works of earlier decades where the emphasis had been on the sea and the weather. The Younger van de Velde was very strongly influenced by Simon de Vlieger, whose pupil he was. The Elder van de Velde had first visited England in the 1660s, but both father and son left Holland permanently for London in 1672, leaving the master of heavy seas, the German-born Ludolf Bakhuizen, as the leading artist in Amsterdam.[25] Reinier Nooms, who had been a sailor and signed his works Zeeman ("seaman"), specialized in highly accurate battle scenes and ship portraits, with some interest also in effects of light and weather, and it was his style that was to be followed by many later specialized artists. Abraham Storck and Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten were other battle specialists. Nooms also painted several scenes of dockyard maintenance and repair operations, which are unusual and of historical interest.[26]

The tradition of marine painting continued in the Flemish part of the Netherlands, but was much less prominent, and took longer to shake off the Mannerist style of shipwrecks amid fantastic waves. Most paintings were small zeekens, whereas the Dutch painted both large and small works. The leading artist was

Bonaventura Peeters.[27]

Ludolf Bakhuizen, Dutch warships in trouble off Gibraltar, a real incident of 1690

The Dutch style was exported to other nations by various artists who emigrated, as well as mere emulation by foreign artists. The most important emigrants were the leading Amsterdam marine artists, the father and son Willem van de Velde. Having spent decades chronicling Dutch naval victories over the English, after the collapse of the art market in the disastrous rampjaar of 1672, they accepted an invitation from the English court to move to London, and spent the rest of their lives painting the wars from the other side. Artists loosely said to have "followed" their style include Isaac Sailmaker, although he was a much earlier Dutch emigrant who had preceded their arrival in England by at least 20 years, and whose style is very different from theirs; as well as Peter Monamy, whose style derives from numerous marine painters besides the van de Veldes, such as Nooms, Peeters and Bakhuizen; and several others, such as Thomas Baston and the Vale brothers, who painted in the native English tradition.

Increasingly, marine art was already mostly left to specialists, with rare exceptions like

Bonaventura Peeters and Hendrik van Minderhout, an emigrant from Rotterdam, as the leading exponents there, and Jan Baptist Weenix in the Republic.[29]

18th century

William Hodges, The Resolution and Adventure in Matavai Bay (Tahiti), 1776.

The century supplied an abundance of military actions to depict, and before the

Moby Dick, who knew them only from prints.[31] At the bottom end of the market, ports in many European countries by now had "pierhead artists" at the docks, who would paint cheap ship portraits that were typically fairly accurate as to the features and rigging of the ship, which was demanded by sailor customers, but very formulaic in general artistic terms.[32]

The Venetian artists

vedute in which the canals, gondolas
and other small craft, and lagoon of Venice are most often prominent features; many of Guardi's later works barely show land at all, and Canaletto's works from his period in England also mostly feature a river and boats. Both produced a large quantity of work, not all of the same quality, but their best paintings handle water and light superbly, though in very different moods, as Canaletto's world is always bright and sunny, where Guardi's is often overcast, if not misty and gloomy.

Claude Joseph Vernet

Naval cadets were now encouraged to learn drawing, as new coastal charts made at sea were expected to be accompanied by "coastal profiles", or sketches of the land behind, and artists were appointed to teach the subject at naval schools, including John Thomas Serres, who published Liber Nauticus, and Instructor in the Art of Marine Drawings in 1805/06.[33] Professional artists were now often sent on voyages of exploration, like William Hodges (1744–1797) on James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and exotic coastal scenes were popular as both paintings and prints.

Prints had become as significant as a source of income as the original painting for some artists, for example the much-engraved French painter

Claude Joseph Vernet (1714–1789), who both revived something of the spirit of the Mannerist tempest, and looked forward to Romanticism, in his large and extremely dramatic scenes of storms and shipwrecks. He was also commissioned by the French government to produce a series of views of French harbours,[2] with the strange result that many of his works showing merchant shipping are very violent, and most showing naval vessels very tranquil. He also developed a type of large Claudeian harbour-scene, at sunset and with a generalized Mediterranean setting, which were imitated by many artists. Another early Romantic French, or at least Alsatian-Swiss, artist was Philip James de Loutherbourg (1740–1812), who spent most of his career in England, where he was commissioned by the government to produce a number of works depicting naval victories. Watson and the Shark is a famous marine history subject of 1778 by John Singleton Copley
.

Romantic Age to present

J. M. W. Turner, The Slave Ship, 1840

The Romantic period saw marine painting rejoin the mainstream of art, although many specialized painters continued to develop the "ship portrait" genre.

Marseille
throughout the 1800s with detailed portraits of ships and maritime life. Arguably the greatest icon of Romanticism in art is
The Athenaeum described Turner's Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich of 1842.[34]

art of Denmark, featured coastal scenes very strongly, with an emphasis on tranquil waters and still, golden light. These influenced the German Caspar David Friedrich, who added an element of Romantic mysticism, as in The Stages of Life (1835); his The Sea of Ice is less typical, showing a polar shipwreck. Ivan Aivazovsky continued the old themes of battles, shipwrecks and storms with a full-blooded Russian Romanticism, as in The Ninth Wave
(1850).

River, harbour and coastal scenes, typically with only small boats, were popular with

Barbizon school, especially Charles-François Daubigny; many of the most famous works of the most important Russian landscapist, Isaac Levitan, featured tranquil lakes and also the huge rivers of Russia, which he and many artists treated as a source of national pride. Gustave Courbet painted a number of scenes of beaches with cliffs and views looking out to sea of waves breaking on a beach, usually with no human figures or craft. During the 1860s Édouard Manet painted a number of paintings depicting important and newsworthy events including his 1864 'marine' painting of the Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama, memorializing a sea battle that took place in 1864 during the Civil War in the United States.[35]

HMS Pomone, a colour lithograph by T. G. Dutton, after a painting by G.F. St.John

The ship portrait genre was taken to America by a number of emigrants, most English like James E. Buttersworth (1817–1894) and Robert Salmon (1775 – c. 1845). The Luminist Fitz Henry Lane (1804–1865) was the earliest of a number of artists who developed American styles based in landscape art; he painted small boats at rest in tranquil small bays. Martin Johnson Heade was a member of the Hudson River School, and painted tranquil scenes, but also threatening storms of alarming blackness. Winslow Homer increasingly specialized in marine scenes with small boats towards the end of the century, often showing boats in heavy swells on the open sea, as in his The Gulf Stream.Thomas Eakins often painted river scenes, including Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871).[2] Thomas Goldsworthy Dutton (1820-1891) has the reputation of being one of the finest lithographers of 19th Century nautical scenes and ship portraits.[36]

Sea Bathing, the Beach at Étretat by Eugène Lepoittevin, 1864. Figures identified include Guy de Maupassant, in blue cap at left.[37]

Later in the century, as the coast became increasingly regarded as a place of pleasure rather than work, beach scenes and coastal landscapes without any shipping became prominent for the first time, often including cliffs and rock formations, which had earlier been mostly found in scenes of shipwreck. Many later beach scenes became increasingly crowded, as holidaymakers took over the beaches of Europe.

Stormy Sea in Étretat. It was his Impression, Sunrise (1872), a view over the waters of the harbour at Le Havre, that had given the movement its name. River scenes were very common among the Impressionists, especially by Monet and Alfred Sisley.[2]

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who mainly painted rivers and the canals of Venice. Towards the end of the 19th century the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder created moody and darkly visionary early modernist seascapes. The Fauve and Pointilliste groups included fairly tranquil waters in large numbers of their work, as did Edvard Munch in his early paintings. In England the Newlyn School and the naive fisherman-artist Alfred Wallis
are worth noting.

The rather traditional British marine artist Sir Norman Wilkinson was during World War I the inventor of dazzle camouflage, by which ships were boldly painted in patterns, achieving results not dissimilar to Vorticism, inspiring the naval ditty: "Captain Schmidt at the periscope / You need not fall or faint / For it’s not the vision of drug or dope / But only the dazzle paint".[38] When the American navy adopted the idea in 1918, Frederick Judd Waugh was put in charge of design.

Specialized marine painters concentrating on ship portraits continue to the present day, with artists such as

Atlantic
coastlines.

19th century gallery

20th century gallery

21st century gallery

East Asian traditions

Court style panorama Along the River During the Qingming Festival, an 18th-century copy of a 12th-century original by Chinese artist Zhang Zeduan. The scroll begins at the right end, and culminates above as the Emperor boards his yacht to join the festive boats on the river.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa, by Hokusai, c. 1830

As noted above, a river with a small boat or two was a standard component of

Chinese ink and brush paintings
, and many featured lakes and, less often, coastal views. However the water was often left as white space, with the emphasis firmly on the land elements in the scene. The more realist court school of Chinese painting often included careful depictions of the shipping on China's great rivers in the large horizontal scrolls showing panoramas of city scenes with the Emperors progressing across the Empire, or festivals like the one shown above.

The turning-away from long-distance maritime activity of both the Chinese and Japanese governments at the time of the Western Renaissance no doubt helped to inhibit the development of marine themes in the art of these countries, but the more popular Japanese

woodblock prints very often featured coastal and river scenes with shipping, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1832) by Hokusai
, the most famous of all ukiyo-e images.

See also

Notes

  1. ISBN 0-295-97656-X, 9780295976563 [1]
    (accessed Jan. 15, 2009 on Google Book Search)
  2. ^ a b c d e "Grove": Cordingley, D., Marine art in Grove Art Online. Accessed April 2, 2010
  3. ^ Russell, Margarita: Visions of the Sea: Hendrick C. Vroom and the Origins of Dutch Marine Painting. (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1983)
  4. ^ Keyes, George S.: Mirror of Empire: Dutch Marine Art of the Seventeenth Century [exh. cat.]. (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
  5. ^ Giltaij, Jeroen; Kelch, Jan; et al. (eds.): Praise of Ships and the Sea: The Dutch Marine Painters of the 17th Century [exh. cat.]. (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1997)
  6. ^ Russell, 4
  7. ^ Russell, 51
  8. ^ Hall, 84-85
  9. ^ Clark, 31-32
  10. ^ Kren, 84, note 1. Châtelet, 34–35 and 194–196 – both are illustrated there.
  11. ^ a b Russel, 53
  12. ^ McDonald, 104-105,British Museum highlights Archived 2015-10-18 at the Wayback Machine
  13. ^ The Greenwich Portuguese carracks - see next section.
  14. ^ Russell, 24-32
  15. ^ Russell; this is the main theme of here chapter 2, especially pp. 45-46
  16. ^ Russell, 40-41, and Grove
  17. ^ National Maritime Museum Archived 2010-06-17 at the Wayback Machine; see also Grove.
  18. ^ Stadel, Frankfurt, Holbein drawing, see also Russell, 53, and illus. p.54
  19. ^ The conventional view, although Russell seems unpersuaded of this, see p. 43
  20. ^ Slive, 213
  21. ^ Slive, 213, the start of his chapter 9, which is devoted to Marine painting
  22. ^ Slive, 213-216
  23. ^ Russell, 57-61
  24. ^ Described in Slive, 216-220
  25. ^ Slive, 220-224
  26. ^ Slive, 223
  27. ^ Vlieghe, 198-200
  28. ^ Slive, 214
  29. ^ Vlieghe, 178 and 199-200
  30. ^ Grove; Slive, 213
  31. Moby Dick
    .
  32. ^ Harold Osborne, Anthony Langdon. "Marine painting", in The Oxford Companion to Western Art, Ed. Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. accessed 5 October 2010 [2]
  33. ^ Taylor, 134-135
  34. ^ Andrews 177-178; Snowstorm.
  35. ^ Philadelphia Museum of Art Retrieved April 8, 2010
  36. ^ T.G.Dutton
  37. ^ "Lot 123: Eugène Moodeste Edmond Le Poittevin, Bathing in Étretat". www.sothebys.com.
  38. ^ Article (see end) by Archived 2010-12-06 at the Wayback Machine Andrew Graham-Dixon
  39. ^ Andrews, 21, and Most Wanted and Least Wanted Paintings

References

Further reading

  • E. H. H. Archibald: Dictionary of Sea Painters(Woodbridge, 1981) .
  • D. Cordingly: Marine Painting in England: 1700–1900(London, 1974).
  • A. S. Davidson: Marine Art & Liverpool Painters, Places & Flag Codes, 1760-1960 (Wolverhampton 1986)
  • W. Gaunt: Marine Painting: An Historical Survey(London, 1975).
  • J. Taylor: Marine Painting: Images of Sail, Sea and Shore(London, 1995) .
  • J. Wilmerding: A History of American Marine Painting(Boston, MA, 1968) .

External links
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