The Sea in Art: A Historical Journey from Ancient Greece to Modern Illustrations

The sea has figured prominently in the art of various historical periods, particularly in the Western world. However, its great expanse and relative plainness of aspect, at least in calm weather, mean that the sea has often been a setting rather than a subject in itself.

Some of the finest examples of ancient Greek art involve the sea, including the so-called Dionysus Cup, a broad wine cup whose interior painting depicts the god of wine reclining aboard a small ship. Dolphins (according to myth, transformed pirates) swim around the ship, and a fruiting grape vine grows up its mast. Signed by the potter and vase painter Exekias, it is dated to about 530 BCE. An unsigned painting on what is known as the Siren Vase (c. 480-470 BCE) illustrates a more dramatic mythical scene: the ship of the Greek adventurer Odysseus beset by sirens.

Ships were a popular theme in European art during the opening years of the Age of Exploration, and the sea itself soon began to play a more prominent role. One of the most famous works from this period is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1560s), traditionally attributed to the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-69). The painting juxtaposes a peasant plowing a field in the foreground with a ship under sail in a wide expanse of sea in the background, while the youth of the Greek legend is rendered as a tiny figure disappearing, unnoticed, into the water. In addition to artists such as Bruegel, cartographers documenting the age’s discoveries produced maps whose colors, design, and embellishments qualify them in many aspects as works of art.

Artists of the Romantic period, who emphasized strong emotion and the beauty of nature, found an ideal subject in a sea whose mood could range from entrancingly calm to frighteningly stormy. An outstanding example from the time is Raft of the Medusa (181819) by the French artist Theodore Gericault (1791-1824), a heart-rending depiction of the desperate survivors of the 1816 wreck of a French frigate. The renowned English artist J. M. W Turner (1775-1851) captured the power of the sea and the elements in a number of paintings such as Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842), a chaotic swirl of darkness and light in which the boat itself is scarcely visible. The artist was said to have had himself tied to the mast of a ship during a storm in order to grasp the situation more fully.

The French realist Gustave Courbet (1819-77) created a number of marine paintings, including the dramatic Stormy Sea (c. 1869), and a contrasting work in brighter, gentler colors called The Calm Sea (1869). The American realist Winslow Homer (1836-1910) painted the sea in a number of powerful works, including The Gulf Stream (1899). One of his most famous paintings, it depicts a lone sailor whose dismasted boat is being circled by sharks as a waterspout threatens nearby.

Like the Romantics before them, the Impressionists found an ideal subject in the ever-shifting aspects of the sea, although their approach—which emphasized the optical properties of light—was different. The French painter Claude Monet (1840-1926), for example, captured the character of the Atlantic Ocean and its shores in such works as Stormy Sea in Etretat (1883).

As a young man, the Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) had been exposed to European engravings sold by Dutch traders, and his own works came to reflect their perspective. Then, as examples of Oriental art began to circulate throughout Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century, Hokusai’s own prints influenced the works of Monet and his fellow Impressionists in turn. The Japanese artist’s most famous work is a dazzlingly dramatic-colored woodblock print titled The Great Wave Off Kanagawa (c. 1830-2), which became particularly important to later European painters and is now recognized as a masterpiece of marine art.

Pigs and Chickens. Throughout history, sailors have employed many symbols to protect them on their long voyages across the sea. One of those symbols is a combination of a pig and a chicken. There are a few different explanations for the popularity of this imagery. The first explanation is that both the pig and chicken avoid water, and so sailors would get them tattooed on their body as a symbolic protection against death by drowning. The second explanation has nothing to do with the water, but rather with food. The eggs and ham associated with the chicken and pig evoke the sailor’s hope to be consistently fed. The last explanation is also the most plausible: US Navy ships usually carried pigs and chickens in wooden pens on the decks. During shipwrecks, the pens would often float ashore with the other debris from the sunken ship, leaving the pigs and chickens as the only survivors of a tragedy. Andrew Vierra and Rainer F. Buschmann

Although often less highly regarded than so-called fine artists, commercial illustrators have produced estimable works of sea art since the late nineteenth century. Winslow Homer himself began his career as an illustrator, while fellow Americans Howard Pyle (1853-1911) and N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945) both painted powerful illustrations for such classics as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883). Another American, Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), produced striking black- and-white illustrations for a 1930 edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and his own memoir of his eventful voyage to Greenland, N by E (1930). In more recent years, noted maritime artist Geoff Hunt (1948-) has painted appealing covers for the popular Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian. Grove Koger

FURTHER READING:House, John and David M. Hopkin. 2007. Impressionists by the Sea. London: Royal Academy of Arts.

Isham, Howard F. 2004. Image of the Sea: Oceanic Consciousness in the Romantic Century. New York: Peter Lang.

Nelson, Harold B. 1989. Sounding the Depths: 150 Years of American Seascape. New York: American Federation of Arts: San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

Riding, Christine and Richard Johns. 2013. Turner & the Sea. London: Thames & Hudson.