Marine art

From Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages marine subjects were shown when required for narrative purposes, but did not form a genre in the West, or in Asian ink painting traditions, where a river with a small boat or two was a standard component of scholar landscapes.

[7] The ship functioned as an image of the church, as in Giotto's lost Navicella above the entrance to Old St Peter's in Rome, but such representations are of relatively little interest from the purely marine point of view.

[8] A distinct tradition begins to re-emerge in Early Netherlandish painting, with two lost miniatures in the Turin-Milan Hours, probably by Jan van Eyck in about 1420, showing a huge leap in the depiction of the sea and its weather.

Kenneth Clark says: "The figures in the foreground are in the chivalric style of the de Limbourgs; but the sea shore beyond them is completely outside the 15th-century range of responsiveness, and we see nothing like it again until Jacob van Ruisdael's beach-scenes of the mid-17th century.

During the Gothic period the nef, a large piece of goldsmith's work in the shape of a ship, used for holding cutlery, salt or spices, became popular among the grand.

According to Margarita Russell, one of Erhard Reuwich's woodcuts from the first printed travel book (1486) shows him trying to demonstrate his understanding of the curvature of the Earth with a ship half-seen on the horizon.

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.

The Netherlandish tradition of the "world landscape", a panoramic view from a very high viewpoint, pioneered by Joachim Patinir in the 1520s, once again begins to include a wide expanse of water in a rather similar way to the classical paintings, which these artists cannot have been aware of.

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 National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, "which has justly been labelled the earliest known pure marine painting".

[16] This probably represents the meeting of two small fleets involved in escorting a Portuguese princess going to be married; a type of ceremonial maritime subject which remained very common in court art until the late 17th century, although more often set at the point of embarkation or arrival.

The highly picturesque and historically useful Anthony Roll was a luxury illuminated manuscript inventory of the ships of the Royal Navy prepared for Henry VIII in the 1540s.

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.

The Dutch Republic relied on fishing and trade by sea for its exceptional wealth, had naval wars with Britain and other nations during the period, and was criss-crossed by rivers and canals.

[20] Pictures of sea battles told the stories of a Dutch navy at the peak of its glory, though today it is usually the "calms", or more tranquil scenes that are highly estimated.

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.

[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.

[28] Van Dyck made some fine drawings of the English coast from boats off Rye, apparently when waiting for his ship to the continent, but never produced any paintings.

[29] The century supplied an abundance of military actions to depict, and before the Annus Mirabilis of 1759 the English and French had roughly equal numbers of victories to celebrate.

There were a considerable number of very accomplished specialist artists in several countries, who continued to develop the Dutch style of the previous century, sometimes in a rather formulaic manner, with carefully accurate depictions of ships.

The Frenchman Ambroise Louis Garneray, mainly active as a painter in the following century, was an experienced sailor, and the accuracy of his paintings of whaling is praised by the narrator in Herman Melville's Moby Dick, who knew them only from prints.

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.

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.

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.

Arguably the greatest icon of Romanticism in art is Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1819), and for J. M. W. Turner painting the sea was a lifelong obsession.

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.

Eugène Lepoittevin painted maritime subjects ranging from naval battles and shipwrecks to scenes of fisherman at work and swimmers relaxing at the beach at Étretat in Normandy.

Eugène Boudin's scenes of the beaches of north France strike a familiar note to the modern viewer, despite the heavy clothing worn by the ladies sitting on chairs in the sand.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder created moody and darkly visionary early modernist seascapes.

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 ukiyo-e coloured 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.