Nautical Art

Marine art or maritime art is a form of figurative art (that is, 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—a genre particularly strong from the 17th to 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."Grove": Cordingley, D., ''Marine art'' in Grove Art Online. Accessed April 2, 2010 Strictly speaking "maritime art" should always include some element of human seafaring, whereas "marine art" would also include pure seascapes with no 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 – really began with Dutch Golden Age painting in the 17th century. 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. 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". 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.

File:Dynasty 12 Egyptian model boat (Amenemhet I).jpg, Egyptian model boat, 12th dynasty, Amenemhet I
File:Nile Mosaic.jpg, Nile mosaic of Palestrina (1st century BCE)
File:Flotte normande.jpg, Norman ship of the invasion fleet, Bayeux Tapestry, 11th century
File:Shipwreck Hugh de Boves.jpg, Shipwreck of Hugh de Boves by Matthew Paris, 13th century, English

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 fifteenth-century range of responsiveness, and we see nothing like it again until Jacob van Ruisdael's beach-scenes of the mid-17th century." There was also a true seascape, the ''Voyage of St Julian & St Martha'', 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. The earliest comparable painting to survive comes from several decades later.

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. 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.

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.

File:Retour d Isabelle de France en Angleterre.jpg, Isabel of France lands at Harwich; miniature of 1455-60 by Jean Fouquet
File:Gentile da Fabriano 064.jpg, Gentile da Fabriano, a miracle of St Nicholas of Bari
File:Master W with the Key ship.jpg, Engraving by Master W with the Key
File:Battle of Zonchio 1499.jpg, Woodcut with colour of the Battle of Zonchio in 1499

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". 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. 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.

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.

The highly picturesque and historically useful Anthony Roll was a luxury illuminated manuscript inventory of the ships of the Royal Navy prepared for Henry VIII in the 1540s. However it is neither very visually accurate nor artistically accomplished, having perhaps been illustrated by the official concerned. As in France, 16th-century English paintings of elaborate royal embarkations and similar occasions are formulaic, if often impressive. Most used Netherlandish artists, as did representations in prints of the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The Virgin of the Navigators is a Spanish work of the 1530s with a group of ships at anchor, presumably in the New World, protected by the Virgin.

Mannerism in both Italy and the North began to paint fantastic tempests with gigantic waves and lightning-filled skies, which had not been attempted before but were to return into fashion at intervals over the following centuries. As naval warfare became more prominent from the late 16th century, there was an increased demand for works depicting it, which were to remain a staple of maritime painting until the 20th century, pulling the genre in the direction of history painting, with an emphasis on the correct and detailed depiction of the vessels, just as other trends pulled in the direction of increasingly illusionist and subtle effects in the treatment of the sea and weather, paralleling those of landscape painting. Many artists could paint both sorts of subject, but others specialized in one or the other. However at this date seascapes showing a large portion of sea and with no vessels at all were very rare.

Maritime painting of the Dutch Golden Age

The Dutch Republic relied on fishing and trade by sea for its exceptional wealth, had naval wars with Britain and other nations during the period, and was criss-crossed by rivers and canals. By 1650 95% of ships passing from the North Sea into the Baltic were Dutch. Pictures of sea battles told the stories of a Dutch navy at the peak of its glory, though today it is usually the "calms", or more tranquil scenes that are highly estimated. It is therefore no surprise that the genre of maritime painting was enormously popular in Dutch Golden Age painting, and taken to new heights in the period by Dutch artists. As with landscapes, the move from the artificial elevated view typical of earlier marine painting to a low viewpoint was a crucial step, made by the first great Dutch marine specialist Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom