The new school of landscape was deficient neither in enthusiasm nor energy. Men of marked originality and brilliant capacity rallied to it in large numbers, and with the vigorous initiative of pioneers in a land of promise set to work to make their discoveries effective. They wrested nature’s secrets from her one by one, secrets of colour, secrets of illumination and light and shade, secrets and mysteries of ever-changing atmospheric effect. There were still “views” to paint, but instead of being treated as matters of dry topography they were used as subjects for pictures in which the painter’s temperamental response to the inspiration he received was plainly manifested, and in which the impression made upon him by the motive in its various aspects was appropriately summed up. In a very short time the British landscape school became under the stimulus of the new thought and the new methods the most important in the world, and the most independent and progressive in its practice.
But, even then, few painters had realized the wonderful pictorial possibilities of the sea. There were some who attempted marine subjects and coast scenes but only as occasional diversions from their ordinary course of study—as illustrations of their capacity to deal with nature in any phase or mood, or it may be to gain experience in what was to them a novel kind of material. Probably in the eighteenth century an excursion to the coast was something of an adventure for men who lived inland; facilities for travel were very limited, and it was easier for an artist to record the subjects which were conveniently within his reach than to struggle against difficulties to reach places remote from his home. Moreover, his clients were mostly stay-at-home people, too, who knew the sea only as a sort of vague abstraction, as something they had heard about, but of which they had no personal knowledge, and therefore their interest in it was too indefinite to be remunerative to him. It was more to his advantage to paint the things they knew than to make them realize what seemed to them strange and surprising.
Anyhow, nearly all the earlier painters of marine subjects were men who had some particular reason for taking to this line of practice. One of the first—Charles Brooking, who was born in 1723—was brought up in Deptford Dockyard, and as a not unnatural consequence acquired considerable skill in the representation of shipping and naval incidents. During the latter part of his short life—he died at the age of thirty-six—he gave some instruction to Dominic Serres, a Frenchman by birth, who was a foundation member of the Royal Academy and was appointed to the post of Marine Painter to the King. Serres had been a sailor, and was captured by an English frigate in the war of 1752 when he was in command of a trading vessel; he settled in this country, and with Brooking’s assistance and a good deal of hard work on his own part became a painter of repute. In his choice of the direction he followed in his art he was, like Brooking, influenced by his earlier associations and by the desire to treat pictorially material with which he was thoroughly conversant.
Another artist of this period who was almost exclusively a marine painter was Nicholas Pocock, born in 1741. He, too, had been at sea, and had commanded a sailing vessel before he adopted the profession of painting. Yet another was John Cleveley, born 1745, who is supposed to have been the son of a draughtsman in Deptford Dockyard, and who in his youth held some post there himself; and there was another Cleveley, Robert by name, born about the same time, who gained distinction by his pictures of naval engagements. He, again, had had previous experience at sea. Then there was Clarkson Stanfield, born at Sunderland in 1793, who went to sea in his boyhood, and was for a while in the Navy, until an accident cut short his career; his particular place in art was determined by the knowledge of his subject which he had gained before he turned to the profession of sea painter. And to the list can be added George Chambers, born at Whitby in 1803, the son of a seaman, and himself a sailor when he was not more than ten years old.
That men like these should have specialized in sea painting is not surprising. It is evident, by their later success as artists, that they had the faculty of observation and the capacity to visualize their impressions, and almost as a matter of course they were inclined to put into a pictorial form the matters with which they were so well acquainted. The sea had become a part of their lives, and of shipping they had an exact and technical knowledge; and they were in touch with people who were no strangers to the sea, and who in consequence demanded that it should be represented with fidelity and understanding. Everything combined to make them the leaders in a branch of practice which requires close and accurate insight, and their works in the early days of the nature study development set a standard of accomplishment which was helpful in the highest degree; a standard which might never have been reached if sea painting had been nothing more than the diversion of the landsman who now and again went for a sketching trip to the coast. The marine painters of our modern days who work with conscience and a love of completeness owe, perhaps, more than they realize to these predecessors of theirs who established the tradition of serious effort to get things right, and who built this tradition upon first-hand knowledge.
But to some extent it is to the example of these specialists that must also be ascribed the skill in sea painting that, as time went on, was attained by many of their contemporaries who did not deal systematically with this class of subject. The habitual landscape painter, accustomed to fixed forms and effects that followed more or less regular rules, might easily have drifted into a conventional representation of the sea if he had not been shown the way to look at it by the men who knew it intimately, and if works by these men had not existed to provide him with the means of testing his own achievement. For his own credit, however, he had to strive to compete with them in knowledge of the sea, and had to measure an understanding of it acquired by deliberate and conscious effort against theirs which had been obtained by prolonged and personal contact; and to uphold his reputation as a painter of capacity he had to prove that he could grasp the essentials of whatever type of material he might elect to handle. Therefore, the adoption of a convention, the inadequacy of which could have easily been demonstrated, would have been a confession either of want of conscience or of deficient intelligence, and would have reflected upon his claim to rank as an artist of distinction.
That is why at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth the number of men who, without specializing in the subject, painted the sea with undeniable ability, had become considerable. By that time artists were moving about much more freely in search of motives, and many of them made frequent visits to the coast with the particular intention of mastering the problems of sea painting, and of studying at first hand phases of nature which were to them comparatively new. Moreover, the interest taken by the public in sea pictures had grown in a marked degree, and there was a demand which the popular artist was called upon to satisfy. So most of the landscape men alternated regularly between inland views and coast scenes, and painted both with the same sincerity and the same strength of purpose. Constable, David Cox, De Wint, Copley Fielding, Edward Duncan, J. S. Cotman—to quote a few of the more notable names—added important records of sea and coast subjects to the list of their more memorable productions; and there was, of course, Turner, who might with justice be claimed as the greatest of all marine painters despite the fact that his sea pictures make up only a small proportion of his total achievement.
Turner was supreme because he, and he only, estimated at its full value the poetry and the majesty of the sea; because he alone could grasp its immensity and its tragic strength and yet be exquisitely in sympathy with its smiling serenity and placid calm. Turner saw and understood the drama of the sea, and by the largeness of his vision and the depth of his understanding he was enabled to present this drama in all its varieties of action. But then, Turner had not only “the eye of an eagle”—as Ruskin said of him—he had, too, the gift of imagination by which realities are transmuted into poetic suggestion. Accuracy of detail and plain statement of fact were the foundations on which his art was built (and no one made more sure of his facts or looked more closely into details), but the superstructure he erected was designed and arranged to express his own large conception of his motive as a whole, and to illustrate the workings of his own emotion. Therefore, when he painted the sea it was the appeal that his subjects made to his imagination that directed and established the final result; and how strong this appeal was can be judged from the amazing beauty and power of his accomplishment as a marine painter. Although it has been given to no other artist to rival or approach Turner in mastery of accomplishment, although it is difficult to believe that there can ever be another painter who will be able to claim equality with him in the same sphere of art, the stimulus of Turner’s example must always be vividly felt by every true student of nature, and especially by every one who aspires to paint marine subjects in the right manner. For, certainly, the poetry of the sea and the drama of the sea are among the most salient of its characteristics, and there is surrounding it an atmosphere of sentiment that must be sympathetically perceived. A commonplace and matter-of-fact statement of wave forms would be about as worthless artistically as an architectural elevation of a mountain range, and the more coldly and scientifically correct it was the less would it convey of the spirit of the sea. The frame of mind in which the painter must assume his task must be akin to that of Thomson when he wrote:
“Thou, majestic main
A secret world of wonders in thyself!”
and in this world of wonders he must be prepared always to find some new secret which will deepen his sense of the mystery of the sea and make him feel that with all his striving he has touched only the fringe of its romance. At no stage in his study will he be in a position to say that he has learned enough and that his subject has no more to reveal; every fresh discovery will open up to him new matters for investigation, and suggest other lines of thought.