Nautical

About

Ships and the sea became a specialist genre in the 17th-century Dutch Republic, whose wealth arrived by water. Hendrick Vroom painted fleets with a shipwright's precision, and Willem van de Velde the Younger, who later worked for Charles II in England, caught a warship firing a salute in The Cannon Shot (c. 1680): drifting smoke, glassy water and slack sails.

The 19th century brought drama and elegy. Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19) turned a notorious shipwreck into a heap of survivors signalling to a distant sail, and J. M. W. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire (1839) shows a veteran of Trafalgar towed to the breakers by a steam tug. In Japan, Katsushika Hokusai's Under the Wave off Kanagawa (c. 1831) dwarfs three fishing boats beneath a clawing crest. Look for rigging drawn line by line, flags that name a nation and weather that sets the mood.