British Marine Painting

by Unknown

What makes the problems of marine painting so complex is, first of all, the fact that the sea is never in absolute repose, and therefore its surface forms are constantly undergoing some degree of change. Another difficulty is that the sea-water seems to vary in composition and consistency according to the conditions under which it is viewed; at one time it is solid, opaque, ponderous, and sombre in colour, and at another it is light, transparent and full of delicate tints. As it is a reflecting substance as well as one through which light can pass it alters in appearance in the most surprising manner under the incidence of sunlight or in response to the variations in atmospheric effect; and as it is a moving body it appears to be subject to no laws of construction and to have no sort of method in its restlessness. Most people, indeed, would hold that the cynical comment on womankind, “Toujours femme varie, souvent elle est folle,” could be applied with particular appropriateness to the sea, so feminine is it in its charming irresponsibility.

Yet the student of the sea can, if he sets to work in the right way, discover the sources of its irresponsibility and the reasons for its lapses into insanity. He can dissect its forms and learn its anatomical construction, and he can find out what regulates and determines its movements. He can establish a direct agreement between the apparent texture of the sea and the bottom over which it flows, as well as between its surface character and the nature of the weather. And having dissected and analysed, having investigated and arranged his discoveries in the proper order, he can solve pictorial problems which ordinary men would count as puzzles to which there was no key. With this knowledge at his disposal he would be able, too, to paint pictures which would show the sea as it is and as it can be, not as an erratic and unaccountable phenomenon acting contrary to all natural laws, which is the view given of it by the artists who are incautious enough to paint it without having learned its ways.

For instance, the painter properly equipped would make the right distinction, both in colour and wave form, between the deep sea and that in shallow places; between the transparency of waves breaking on a rocky coast and those on a sandy beach; between the wave action in a tidal current moving with or against the wind; or between the seas that are penned in a narrow channel and those that are running free in wide spaces. These are elementary matters, perhaps, in the study of marine painting, but elementary or not they are only too often misapprehended by the careless observer; and they are typical of a host of others which are not less likely to become pitfalls for the unwary. Neglect of them leads to slovenly and unsatisfactory production and to a kind of work that may be cheaply effective but that has actually no justification for existence.

One mistake very often made by men who have not carried their studies far enough is to miss the necessary connexion between the state of the sea and the accompanying condition of the atmosphere; another is to paint in a sea picture a sky that is in wrong relation to the wave movement. Both these errors arise from the failure of the painter to study his subject as a whole, from his inexperience of what may be called the technical peculiarities of his material. He has by him a sea note that seems worth treating on a more ambitious scale, and he finds in his portfolio a sketch of a sky that composes nicely and is quite attractive in its general character; so he mixes the two together and calls the compilation a marine painting. But, really, unless by some lucky chance the two sketches happened to have been done under similar weather conditions the picture would be no more true to nature than the laboured effort of the “art” photographer who prints his sky from one negative and his landscape from another; or who grafts a studio-lighted figure on to a background photographed out of doors.

The sea painter must, for the credit of art, keep clear of such silly tricks and mechanical devices. He must be logical both in his observations and in the use he makes of them, and he must be consistent in his statement of the facts before him. A picture in which the sea suggests half a gale while the sky is one which would be seen only in a dead calm is an obvious absurdity, and it would be not less ridiculous to paint the full colours of sunlight in an atmosphere of mist and driving rain; yet these things are done by artists from whom more regard for truth is to be expected. Lapses of this sort cannot be forgiven; they imply a shirking of responsibility that is beyond excuse, and a failure to grasp the first principles of nature study. They would never occur if the men who paint the sea would regard it as a living reality which responds to the influence of its surroundings and varies its appearance as circumstances dictate, and if they would recognize that it has its own anatomical structure by which its movements are controlled. There is a reason for everything it does and there is a way of accounting for every aspect it assumes, but the reason has to be sought for, and the way to necessary knowledge must be pursued with painstaking effort. There is no place in marine painting for the man who wants to take things easily.

But any one who is interested in executive problems which demand concentrated attention and sustained investigation will find plenty to tax his fullest energies—problems of drawing, of colour and tone management, of imitative suggestion, and of technical application. As an example of a complex motive which would present a series of difficulties a picture might be imagined of the sea washing in among rocks, some of which are submerged while others stand up above the surface, the water clear and transparent and neither smooth nor much agitated. Through the water the objects beneath would be clearly seen and the surface would reflect the rocks above and catch gleams of light from the sky, and the movement of the small waves swinging towards the rocks and rebounding from them, and eddying over the shallow places, would make a pattern of lines and planes set at all sorts of angles. To realize such a subject adequately an almost perfect balance of observation would be needed. Too much attention given to the under-water details would destroy the suggestion of the surface; too much concentration on the surface lights and reflections would make the water seem opaque; exaggeration of the lines and planes of the ripples would diminish the breadth of effect and alter the character of the subject. The painter must perceive that this problem has many sides, and that each one must receive exactly its right amount of consideration if the pictorial solution is to be correct; if he has to make a compromise with reality the most subtle judgment will be required of him to create an illusion that will look like truth.

To multiply such examples would be easy, for there is no phase of sea painting in which difficulties do not abound. It is difficult to paint a breaking wave, to preserve its architectural quality of design and its appearance of massive strength, and yet to show that it is a moving and momentary thing disappearing as quickly as it is formed. It is difficult to represent the confusion of a stormy sea, churned into foam and tossing in the wildest turmoil, and yet to make intelligible the order and regularity of its movement and the right sequence of its changing forms. It is as difficult to render the smoothness of calm, quiet water without making it look solid and opaque, dull and lifeless, as it is to suggest the liveliness of a breezy day without lapsing into meaningless repetition and restless pattern-making. Every successful sea picture is a difficulty overcome and a problem solved, and every successful sea painter is a man who has struggled earnestly with intractable material and has built his achievement on a foundation of laboriously acquired knowledge. Probably that is why there have been comparatively few great sea painters; it is certainly a reason why the few who can be accounted great should be regarded as masters of the highest rank with places of distinction in the history of art.

Next in importance to the study of the sea itself comes the acquisition of a capacity to paint shipping, the two do not necessarily go together. There have been many capable painters of the sea who could not draw a ship and did not know how to set it on the water; and there have been many men with an accurate technical knowledge of shipping whose treatment of the sea from the pictorial point of view left much to be desired. As a matter of fact, a ship provides one of the severest tests of draughtsmanship; it is such a complicated collection of lines and curves and so hard to put in proper perspective that it makes exceptional demands upon the artist’s powers. Moreover, every ship has its own individuality, a character peculiar to itself, and to express this individuality as much analytical effort is needed as to draw the right distinction between the differing types of humanity. Details which to the unprofessional eye seem of no significance must be carefully attended to because each one of them contributes something to the sum total of fact and helps to make the character intelligible, and to slur over these details is a fatal mistake. A ship treated conventionally and without personal insight is as uninspiring pictorially as a portrait which has missed all the little human characteristics which made the sitter interesting.

The painter of shipping has, too, a very wide field to cover. He has to range from the yacht to the warship, from the liner to the rusty, weather-beaten tramp; he has to show how the lively movement of the sailing ship differs from the steady, methodical progression of the steamer; he has to understand the behaviour of all sorts of craft under all sorts of weather conditions; and to make this varied assortment of knowledge intelligible in his pictures he has to depend almost entirely upon his powers of drawing. By bad drawing he will not only miss the specific character of the ship, but he will also fail to explain the part that this ship is intended to play in the story which his picture seeks to tell. The introduction of shipping into a painting of the sea is usually to increase the dramatic strength of the subject, but if through technical inefficiency the added incident does not carry conviction or explain itself properly the point of the drama is obscured rather than accentuated.

Unfortunately it is rather too easy to produce instances of the wrong handling of ships in sea pictures, which otherwise are quite acceptable, and of imperfect understanding of the action of vessels afloat. Some of the earlier masters who had studied the sea and knew its ways well made curious mistakes when they brought in a ship as a central feature in their composition. They would fairly often poise a craft of much solidity and considerable tonnage on the very crest of a wave where there was certainly not a sufficient body of water to support it; or they would put a ship so close to a gently shelving beach that there was an obvious and immediate danger of its running aground, a position that would alarm even the boldest of sailors. They were as a rule cheerfully ignorant of the intricacies of rigging and of the set of sails, and occasionally they seemed to credit a ship with an uncanny power of progressing at full speed in the teeth of a stiff breeze. All this resulted from inadequate study of technicalities that a seafaring man would treat as a matter of course—from insufficient acquaintance with things that, after all, scarcely came within the scope of a landsman’s experience.