Summer has now arrived, and many of you will surely have chosen the sea as a destination for their holidays. Do you want to breathe the scent of salt, get a tan on the hot beach, be kissed by the sun’s rays and splash in the water
Here are the 10 works of art inspired by the sea
MILAN – The sea and its pictorial representation were one of the most developed artistic genres in recent centuries. From the classic marine scenes of Fitz Hugh Lane to the contemporary visions of Richard Diebenkorn, from the daring Japanese painting to the incomparable Joseph Turner, theArtWolf has proudly presented the 10 most beautiful, fearless and important marine scenes in the world. 1. THE FIGHTING TEMERARIE by Joseph Mallord William Turner(1839) – Turner is the greatest painter of maritime landscapes of all centuries; bold and technically perfect, Turner’s masterpiece is a tribute to the Temeraire ship he portrays on her last voyage before being scrapped. This supreme work was voted the best painting in England in a poll organized by the National Gallery of London in 2005. 2. THE WAVE by Katsushika Hokusai(1830) – Japanese painters and sculptors have always offered us a different, almost mystical, vision of natural phenomena. Here the wave is much more than just an oceanic circumstance. It is a monster, a giant that threatens with its claws the agile and daring ships that cross the Japanese seas. The terrible claw of the ocean is so powerful that it seems to threaten to devour even the sacred Mount Fuji, represented in the background, as another victim of the evil wave. 3. THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA by Theodore Gericault(1819) – It is one of the most famous paintings ever created. Gericault in this work describes the miseries of a group of shipwrecked abandoned after the sinking of a ship of the French navy. We can say that the image is not exactly an exclusive representation of a maritime landscape, but a classic triangular composition in which various human emotions alternate: who at the top of the pyramid has sighted a ship and hopes for a rescue, to pass to man below that, holding the corpse of a young man, has now abandoned hope and is resigned to waiting for death. In Gericault’s work the sea has no charm, no beauty, no goodness: it is the villain, the killer, the predator who patiently waits for his moment to kill. 4. THE GULF STREAM by Winslow Homer(1899) – Even in this painting, the charm and kindness of the sea is not represented. What is striking in this work is the raw expressiveness, which becomes almost macabre; the spectator can do nothing but watch, helplessly, the tragic end of the unfortunate sailor, represented with great realism, perhaps precisely as proof of Winslow Homer’s training as a journalist. 5. THE TERRACE OF SAINTE ADRESSE by Claude Monet(1867) – This glorious painting presents an evident parallelism with Diebenkorn’s canvas, which represents the sea as friendly, accessible, almost as a recreational moment for society. Also in this case, the composition is divided into three levels – sky, sea and land – and is organized vertically by two large flags waving due to the ocean breeze. 6. OCEAN HORIZON by Richard Diebenkorn (1859) – Diebenkorn’s urban landscapes present a unique and contemporary vision of the sea: domesticated, friendly, desirable. The work ‘Ocean Horizon’ presents a very simple composition with three evident levels representing respectively the earth, the sea and the sky, all framed in a rectangular window. 7. THE ICEBERGS byFrederic Edwin Church (1861) – Beautiful and exuberant at first sight, this masterpiece is still a sinister and terrible romantic document, showing the remains of a shipwreck, where in reality no importance is given to sailors and what happened to them and it will happen: the icebergs will kill them soon if the violence of the accident has not already fulfilled their fate. The brutal beauty of this canvas makes the Titanic story just a bad joke. 8. THE MONK BY THE SEA by Caspar David Friedrich(1809-10) – The horizontality of the image and the evident contrast between the sea and the monk, almost insignificant compared to the magnificence of the sea, fills the image with a rather uncertain romantic message. Is the sea a neutral background behind the monk’s deliberations, or perhaps we are looking at a strange dialogue between man and the endless ocean, a mystical mirror of the monk’s thoughts 9. THE NINTH WAVE by Ivan Aivazonvsky(1850) – Aivazovsky achieves absolute perfection in technique in this painting; a painting depicting a group of unfortunate castaways trying to survive the merciless ocean waves. However, the center of the composition is the powerful – almost mystical – and diffuse representation of the sun, which illuminates the scene with an incredible range of green and pink shades. 10. BECALMED OFF HALFWAY ROCK by Fitz Hugh Lane(1869) – Regarded as one of the greatest seascape painters of all time, Lane is perhaps more of a ‘naval portraitist’ than a traditional seascape painter. In this highly appealing canvas, the artist brilliantly portrays two large ships, accompanied by three support boats, surrounding a small rock which, although small in size, gains fundamental importance in the composition. Alparone Lucrezia 3 August 2014
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