Contextual Art - Essay - Seascapes - part 1


Seascapes
I have chosen to explore how some artists have depicted the sea in their paintings as this is something that interests me for I have attempted quite a few paintings that have the sea in them and I am particularly interested in learning how to depict movement, energy and weather in paintings. But ultimately for me to be moved by a landscape, nine times out of ten it has to have sea in it. The poet Heinrich Heine said “My heart altogether resembles the sea, it has its storms, its ebbs and floods, and far down in its quiet depths rests many a shining pearl.”
                                          Landscape with the Fall of Icarus - Pieter Brueghel    

A Brief History of Seascapes

We find the earliest examples of oceanic subjects in things like the Egyptian pottery and Chinese porcelain.

However seascapes, as a genre of painting, developed with the growth of sea power in Europe. Although there are glimpses of sea and ships in paintings by artists like Pieter Brueghel (b.c. 1525-d.1569) of the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance, they are not the main subjects of the paintings. It was some powerful countries’ struggle to dominate the sea and its trade that brought the sea to the foreground of the public mind.

                                         HMS Victory at the Battle Of Trafalgar - John Constable

In the 18th century the wars between the French, Spanish, Dutch and British fleets and the expansion into the Americas and beyond led to commissions to record victories of battles or as a record of ships high ranking sailors served on. After Napoleon was defeated J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) produced paintings of storms and shipwrecks with desperate human beings hanging on to anything for dear life.

                                     
                                          Fire at Sea - JMW Turner 

 However not all painters had such a gloomy view of the sea. Painters moved on to depict the sea in a human context, with the seashore becoming an important subject and the ships on it. J.A.M. Whistler (1834-1903) saw the sea in this way as did Claude Monet (1840-1926) who, having spent his childhood in Le Havre, had a special affinity for the sea and coasts.

                                          The bathing posts - James Whistler     1893

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