British Marine Painting

by Unknown

Clearly, in marine painting there is no lack of opportunities. In its various branches it offers to the artist room for the most divergent activities and it allows him a spacious field for the exercise of his powers. If he aspires to conquer difficulties they are there in plenty, difficulties which have to be met with courage and handled with discretion. If he is content with simple tasks there are many which will occupy him agreeably and be well worth working out. If he is a serious student of nature’s manifestations they are set before him in profusion, and the whole array of her mysteries is paraded for his instruction; and if humanity is his subject, all the actors in the drama of sea life are there to inspire him with their doings and to stir his imagination with the record of their achievements. Always the contact with the sea brings him something fresh that leads him into new trains of thought and suggests to him new ways of applying his technical skill; but always the demand is made upon him that he should put forth the whole of his effort to reach and maintain the highest standard of artistic practice. There is no place in marine painting for the man who, taking the line of least resistance, seeks by compromise and convention to gloss over his want of knowledge and tries by superficial cleverness of handling to divert attention from the incompleteness of his analysis. An artist of this sort had better let the sea alone and choose something simpler and less abounding with pitfalls for his inexperience.

NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS

THIS series of reproductions of paintings by artists who have given particular attention to marine painting in its various aspects has been made as comprehensive as possible so that it may illustrate adequately a subject capable of the widest application. Examples belonging to different periods have been included to show what have been the changes and developments during a term of nearly two hundred years, and what has been the nature of the appeal of the sea to men of widely differing temperaments. The conventional arrangement, the poetic transcription of fact, the realistic study, the decorative interpretation, and the frank expression of the modern idea are all presented and are available for intelligent comparison. The capabilities, too, of marine painting are made clear, and the extent of opportunity it affords to the serious student of art. There are illustrations which have a specially instructive significance because of the technical knowledge of the subject displayed in them; there are others which are interesting on account of their imaginative quality; and there are others again which reveal the inspiration of the sea life and reflect the spirit by which it is guided. All these have their part in the record of British marine painting, and are both valuable historically and worthy of consideration for artistic reasons.

Rightly, an early place in this record must be assigned to Charles Brooking, because in his works can be seen for the first time the clear intention to study marine subjects with a perception of their inherent characteristics. Brooking’s intimate knowledge of shipping, acquired during his early days at Deptford Dockyard, is plainly shown in such a picture as The Calm (p. 35), which has an attractive truth and precision of statement. It is a matter for much regret that his early death should have cut short a career which was so full of promise, and in which he accomplished so much that deserves to be remembered; but honour is due to him as the painter who gave to our school of marine painting its foundation of accurate observation and careful regard for the actualities of the subject.

Other men carried on ably the tradition he had established, and in a comparatively short time there grew up a by no means inconsiderable group of painters who took an effective interest in the pictorial material with which the sea provided them. Within half a century of his death he had many successors, some of whom were true sea painters, though, perhaps, the majority were landscape men who included the sea in their study of nature’s manifestations, and only turned to it, more or less frequently, in the intervals of their more usual work. Yet in this latter class were counted some of the greatest British masters whose achievements rank among the best by which our school is distinguished. To the company of these masters certainly belongs George Morland, the erratic genius who, ranging over a wide field of subjects, found that the sea was often one of the most helpful sources of his inspiration. His coast scenes—of which the Fishermen Hauling in a Boat (p. 37) is a good example—have a characteristic measure of strenuous vitality and are painted with all the sureness of touch that marked his handling of the rustic motives which occupied so much of his attention. Morland, however, did not paint marine pictures so frequently as his contemporary, John Wilson, who was a consistent student of the sea and lived for some years at Folkestone. His capacity can scarcely be questioned. The picture reproduced (p. 38) has a very modern freshness of manner and shows exceptional knowledge of wave movement and atmospheric subtleties, and though there is in it something of the convention of the period, it certainly conveys the sentiment of nature.

Another master who made many digressions into sea painting was Constable; a number of sea and coast pictures are included among his more memorable performances. His Chesil Beach (p. 39) has the better qualities of his art, its strength and sincerity, its robust directness, and its sense of rightly estimated reality. Without being in any way dry or dull it is singularly faithful in its statement of the facts of the subject and in its adherence to nature’s authority; and it bears decisively the stamp of the artist’s personality.

Even more personal both in point of view and in manner of interpretation are the pictures by Turner, that greatest of all painters of the sea. No one but Turner could have attained such a height of dramatic power as is reached in Lowestoft (p. 45), and The Shipwreck (p. 41), in which the majesty and the tragedy of the sea are expressed with overwhelming strength. Only a supreme master could have kept conception and execution in such perfect relation, or could be so vehement in conviction without lapsing into bombast. But Turner was a master without a peer, and in these two pictures—and the extraordinarily suggestive and mysterious Farne Island (p. 44)—he is seen to rare advantage. Yet he was not less evidently a master when he chose to deal with less ambitious material, when he painted subjects like the Yacht Racing in the Solent (p. 43), and The Prince of Orange Landing at Torbay (p. 42), in which no tragic note was needed, and no greater problem was presented than the expression of the breezy freshness of a restless sea. Always, the acuteness of his vision, the depth of his understanding, and the consummate certainty of his method can be realized, whatever may have been his mood or his intention.

Beside Turner, John Thomson of Duddingston can be assigned but a minor place; yet, amateur though he was, he cannot be passed over as unworthy to be reckoned among the more accomplished of the earlier sea painters. Minister of a church in Scotland, he was able to practise his art only in the intervals of his clerical duties, but as can be judged from his Fast Castle (p. 47) he had real ability and much command of technical processes. He belongs to a period of great importance in British art, a period which produced not only Turner and Constable, but other masters of high rank, two of whom, Cotman and David Cox, painted marine pictures frequently and treated them with delightful sympathy. Cotman’s broad, dignified method is well seen in A Galiot in a Storm (p. 48), a composition finely designed and convincing in its large simplicity; and David Cox’s exquisite perception of beauties of atmospheric effect is rarely better evidenced than in his delicate and luminous Calais Pier (p. 49), a study of sea and sky which can be unreservedly praised for its sensitiveness and truth. It is as rightly seen as it is attractively painted. There is much less freedom and spontaneity in Pyne’s Totland Bay (p. 51), and yet this picture has a scholarly quality that entitles it to respect, though it is a little too formal and conscious. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a fashion for elegant formality, and Pyne was, perhaps, induced to follow this fashion by his study of Italian scenery. As a sea painter he can scarcely be compared with George Chambers and Clarkson Stanfield, who were of the same date, and both of whom had much professional experience of the sea before they became artists. Chambers drew shipping with admirable accuracy—there is ample proof of this in his picture, Off Portsmouth (p. 52)—and knew the ways of the sea intimately; Stanfield was also an excellent draughtsman, but on the whole was more artificial than Chambers. Both men were for some while successful scene painters, and in Stanfield’s work particularly the influence of the theatre is apparent; there is an obvious scenic quality in such pictures as the Entrance to the Zuyder Zee (p. 54) and The Port of La Rochelle (p. 53); and his Coast Scene (p. 55) is planned and composed with the scene-painter’s feeling for construction and distribution of detail. But, despite the theatrical atmosphere of his art, Stanfield’s achievements are not to be despised, because the foundation of them was sound and the knowledge he displayed in them was acquired at first hand.

Dyce’s Pegwell Bay (p. 57) is interesting for two reasons, as a digression by a successful figure painter into open-air work, and as an illustration of the influence exercised by the Pre-Raphaelite movement upon the painters of the time. It is an extraordinary piece of precise statement, photographic in its accuracy, and is painted with a careful regard for reality that deserves recognition. Indeed, its simple honesty makes it of more account than such a picture as Cooke’s Dutch Boats in a Calm (p. 58), which, capable though it is, has more than a suspicion of artificiality; or than E. T. Crawford’s Closehauled, Crossing the Bar (p. 59), in which the spirited treatment of the sea is to some extent discounted by a certain clumsiness in the drawing of the sailing-boats and by the somewhat mechanical manner in which they are used to help out the composition. There is artificiality, too, in the design of Müller’s Dredging on the Medway (p. 60), but it is more cleverly disguised, and the handling is more accomplished. All three of these men, however, contributed something to the sequence of paintings which stands to the credit of the British school, and all were serious observers of the sea.

So, too, was Copley Fielding, though other subject-matter than the sea engaged much of his attention. But he spent a good deal of his time on the coast and used his opportunities there with considerable discretion. As a result his sea paintings have a sympathetic quality that is undeniably persuasive, and they derive an additional charm from their dexterity of brushwork and from their pleasant management of colour and tone. The Coast Scene (p. 61) represents him well; it is an eminently skilful technical exercise, and it conveys correctly an impression of gathering storm and of the force of a rising wind. The suggestion, also, of cold, gleaming light when the sky is partly veiled by dark clouds is sufficiently true and is made with due restraint—without that over-accentuation of tone contrasts which is so apt to destroy breadth and unity of effect.