Waterscapes
Seas, rivers, lakes and shorelines as subjects of painting and photography, from calm estuaries to storm-tossed waves.
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About
Seas, lakes and rivers have been painted for their calm as much as their violence. In the 1640s Simon de Vlieger painted Dutch estuaries in silvery stillness, sails mirrored in the water. The Romantic era preferred the storm: J. M. W. Turner's Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842) dissolves a vessel into a vortex of snow and spray, and Ivan Aivazovsky's The Ninth Wave (1850) shows shipwrecked men clinging to a mast as a wave rises in golden light.
Realists went to the shore to study the water itself. Gustave Courbet painted breaking waves at Étretat around 1869–70 as heavy, sculptural masses, and William Trost Richards spent decades recording surf on American and English coasts. Fitz Henry Lane's harbours of the 1850s and 1860s hold boats in glassy calm, while John Marin's watercolours of the Maine coast break sea and rocks into jagged, energetic strokes.
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