Marine art or maritime art is a form of figurative art (i.e. painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture) that portrays or draws its main inspiration from the sea. Maritime painting is a genre that depicts ships and the sea, being particularly strong from the 17th to the 19th centuries. In practice, the term often covers art showing shipping on rivers and estuaries, beach scenes and all art showing boats, without any rigid distinction—for practical reasons subjects that can be drawn or painted from dry land in fact feature strongly in the genre. Strictly speaking, "maritime art" should always include some element of human seafaring, whereas "marine art" would also include pure seascapes without any human element, though this distinction may not be observed in practice.
Ships and boats have been included in art from almost the earliest times, but marine art only began to become a distinct genre, with specialized artists, towards the end of the Middle Ages, mostly in the form of the "ship portrait", a type of work that is still popular and concentrates on depicting a single vessel. As landscape art emerged during the Renaissance, what might be called the marine landscape became a more important element in works, but pure seascapes were rare until later.
Maritime art, especially marine painting—as a particular genre separate from landscape—actually began with Dutch Golden Age painting in the 17th century.Russell, Margarita: Visions of the Sea: Hendrick C. Vroom and the Origins of Dutch Marine Painting. (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1983)Keyes, George S.: Mirror of Empire: Dutch Marine Art of the Seventeenth Century [exh. cat.]. (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Giltaij, Jeroen; Kelch, Jan; et al. (eds.): Praise of Ships and the Sea: The Dutch Marine Painters of the 17th Century [exh. cat.]. (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1997) Marine painting was a major genre within Dutch Golden Age painting, reflecting the importance of overseas trade and naval power to the Dutch Republic, and saw the first career marine artists, who painted little else. In this, as in much else, specialist and traditional marine painting has largely continued Dutch conventions to the present day. With Romantic art, the sea and the coast was reclaimed from the specialists by many landscape painters, and works including no vessels became common for the first time.
Earliest times to 1400
Vessels on the water have featured in art from the earliest times. The earliest known works are petroglyphs from 12,000 BCE showing reed boats in the Gobustan Petroglyph Reserve in modern Azerbaijan, which was then on the edge of the much larger Caspian Sea. Rock carvings and carved objects depicting ships have been found on several islands of the Aegean (Andros, Naxos, Syros, Astypalaia, Santorini) as well as mainland Greece (Avlis), dating from 4,000 BCE onwards.
Both men and gods are shown on river "barges" in Ancient Egyptian art; these boats were made of papyrus reed for most uses, but the vessels used by the pharaohs were of costly imported cedar wood, like the 43.6 m (143 ft) long and 5.9 m (19.5 ft) wide Khufu ship of c. 2,500. Nilotic landscapes in fresco in Egyptian tombs often show scenes of hunting birds from boats in the Nile delta, and grave goods include detailed models of boats and their crews for use in the afterlife. The central cult image in Egyptian temples was usually a small figure of the god, carried in a barge or "barque".
Ships sometimes appear in Ancient Greek vase painting, especially when relevant in a narrative context, and also on coins and other contexts, though with little attempt at a seascape setting. As in Egyptian painting, the surface of the water may be indicated by a series of parallel wavy lines. Ancient Roman painting, presumably drawing on Greek traditions, very often shows landscape views from the land across a lake or bay with distant land on the horizon, as in the famous "Ulysses" paintings in the Vatican Museums. The water is usually calm, and objects that are submerged, or partly so, may be shown through the water.Russell, 4 The large Nile mosaic of Palestrina (1st-century BCE) is a version of such compositions, with a view intended to show all the course of the river.
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. Marine highlights in Medieval art include the 11th-century Bayeux Tapestry showing the Norman Invasion of England. From the 12th century onwards, seals of ports often featured a "ship portrait".Russell, 51 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.Hall, 84–85
15th century
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. Of the seashore scene called The Prayer on the Shore (or Duke William of Bavaria at the Seashore, the Sovereign's prayer etc.) 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."Clark, 31–32 There was also a true seascape, the Voyage of St Julian & St Martha,Kren, 84, note 1. Châtelet, 34–35 and 194–196 – both are illustrated there. but both pages were destroyed in a fire in 1904, and only survive in black and white photographs. For the rest of the 15th century, illuminated manuscript painting was the main medium of marine painting, and in France and Burgundy in particular many artists became skilled in increasingly realistic depictions of both seas and ships, used in illustrations of wars, romances and court life, as well as religious scenes. Scenes of small pleasure boats on rivers sometimes feature in the calendar miniatures from books of hours by artists such as Simon Bening.
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. Initially just consisting of the "hull", from the 15th century the most elaborate had masts, sails and even crew. As the exotic nautilus shell began to reach Europe, many used these for their hull, like the Burghley Nef of about 1528. Lower down the social scale, interest in shipping was reflected in many early prints of ships. The earliest are by Master W with the Key, who produced several engravings of ships; for some time such "ship portraits" were confined to prints and drawings, and typically showed the ship with no crew, even if under sail. They also usually anticipated the low horizon that painting would not achieve until the 17th century.Russel, 53 The first print of a naval battle is an enormous (548 x 800 mm) woodcut of the Battle of Zonchio in 1499 between the Venetians and the Turks. The only surviving impression is coloured with stencils; most were probably pasted onto walls.McDonald, 104–105,British Museum highlights The earliest comparable painting to survive comes from several decades later.The Greenwich Portuguese carracks – see next section.
At the same time, artists were often involved in the expansion of Western cartography, and more aware than might always seem evident of the scientific and nautical advances of the age. 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. The many coastal views in the book's woodcuts are important in the development of such representations.Russell, 24–32 Birds-eye plans of cities, often coastal, which we would today usually consider as cartography, were often done by artists, and considered as much as works of art as maps by contemporaries.Russell; this is the main theme of here chapter 2, especially pp. 45–46.
Italian Renaissance art showed maritime scenes when required, but apart from the Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio there were few artists in this or the next century who often returned to such scenes, or did so with special sensitivity. Carpaccio's scenes show Venetian canals or docksides; there are several arrivals and departures in his Legend of Saint Ursula. 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.
16th century
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. These paintings were essentially landscapes in the guise of history paintings, with small figures usually representing a religious subject. A strong marine element was therefore present as landscape painting began to emerge as a distinct genre. The Protestant Reformation greatly restricted the uses of religious art, accelerating to the development of other secular types of art in Protestant countries, including landscape art and secular forms of history painting, which could both form part of marine art.
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".Russell, 40–41, and Grove 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.National Maritime Museum ; see also Grove. Another example is the painting in the Royal Collection showing Henry VIII embarking for the Field of the Cloth of Gold, which is typical in clearly showing the ships side-on, with no attempt to adjust for the high view point.
A superb coloured drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger of a ship crowded with drunken lansquenets was perhaps done in preparation for a mural in London. This adopts the low viewpoint typical of the ship portrait.Stadel, Frankfurt , Holbein drawing, see also Russell, 53, and illus. p. 54
Pieter Bruegel the Elder is famous for his development of genre painting scenes of peasant life, but also painted a number of marine subjects, including Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1568); the original is now recognised as lost, and the painting in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels is now seen as a good early copy of Bruegel's original. He also painted a large Naval Battle in the Gulf of Naples, of 1560, Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, Rome, and a small but dramatic late shipwreck scene. A larger storm scene in Vienna, once regarded as his, is now attributed to Joos de Momper. Such subjects were taken up by his successors, including his sons.