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ARTICLES BY A. L. BALDRY

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BRITISH MARINE PAINTING

To most people it will seem quite natural that British artists should give much attention to marine painting. The sea plays a very important part in our national affairs, influences the character of the people, and affects the political policy of the country, so almost as a matter of course it has its place among the sources of inspiration for our native art. Sea painters of the higher rank have come with scarcely an exception from countries which have an extended coast-line and in which the seafaring habit has been developed by centuries of maritime activity--countries in which the use of the sea for purposes of commerce or communication has been a necessity. Dutch artists have painted the sea and shipping and incidents in the life of the dwellers on the coast with skill and distinction; there have been sea painters in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, some in France, a few in Italy and Spain; but it is in the British Isles most of all that the possibilities of marine painting have been recognized and the pictorial material that the sea provides has been turned to full account.

No doubt this is partly due to the fact that British art has concerned itself very greatly with what may be called the physical characteristics of the country. A considerable proportion of our painters have been devoted students of nature, and have occupied themselves with records of British scenery, and of those subtle effects of atmosphere and illumination which are the product of the variable British climate. Responsive themselves to the charm of their surroundings, they have catered for a public which appreciates the beauties of nature and likes to see them realized pictorially; lovers themselves of the land in which they live, they have striven to please the many people who are possessed by a similar sentiment and wish to have about them pictures in which this sentiment is agreeably reflected. No record of British scenery could be complete, and no appeal to British sentiment could be effective, if our artists ignored the wide variety of subjects which the sea offers them.

For the sea is with us a tradition, and the love of the sea is one of the strongest of our national instincts. Because we live on an island the sea is at the same time our protection from those who might seek to do us harm and our means of communication with the rest of the world; it safeguards us against dangers to which other less fortunately situated countries are constantly exposed, and yet it puts us directly in touch with even the most remote and apparently inaccessible peoples. Therefore we regard it naturally as a friendly influence in the lives of us all. But we owe it a debt of gratitude also for the effect it has had upon our British art. It is from our insular climate, from the mists and moisture which the sea brings, that those atmospheric qualities come which make the study of nature in the British Isles such a never-ending delight. It is the surrounding sea that encourages the rich growth of our vegetation, and that gives to our landscape its wealth of detail and its ample variety of colour. As the sea influences the manner of our national life, so it influences the quality, the sentiment, and the method of our art, helping us to build up a school which is insular in its merit and its expression, and national in its feeling and its intention.

Yet, curiously enough, in the earlier period of British art history the names of few painters are recorded who perceived the pictorial interest of the sea or tried to realize its beauties. Indeed, at the beginning no attention was given to the study of open-air nature; landscape painting was not attempted seriously, and the study of atmospheric effects was generally disregarded. The artists of that time occupied themselves mainly with portraits--digressing occasionally into figure compositions--and took little account of anything but the purely human interest in art. They worked for the glorification of their patrons, to adorn the houses of the great, or to prove themselves good sons of the Church, not to bring about the conversion of the people who were insensible to nature's charm.

It would be scarcely fair, however, to accuse the earlier British artists of insensibility because they worked in this manner within circumscribed limits; they only followed, after all, what was the fashion of the schools in other countries. In Italy, for instance, during the splendours of the Renaissance, the study of landscape for its own sake was as little thought of as it was in Great Britain at the time of the Tudors. Many of the Italian masters introduced landscape backgrounds in their figure compositions, but it was landscape of a formal and conventionalized kind, a weaving together of details to form a pattern which was used merely to fill space or to add something to the point of the pictured story. It was never landscape seen and set down as the motive of the painting; at best it was only a sort of still life.

But in Italy at that period the mission of the artist was very exactly defined, and even if he had been inclined to escape from the limitations imposed upon his activities, the custom of the time would have been too strong for him. He was the servant of the great noble and the obedient assistant of the Church, he decorated palaces, and he painted altar-pieces, he recorded scenes from ancient or contemporary history, and incidents in the lives of the saints. Neither the noble nor the churchman wanted from him studies of Italian scenery, or desired that he should show how he was impressed by the brightness of sunlight or by the glory of an evening sky. The severest discouragement would have awaited him if he had attempted anything so unconventional; he might even have incurred penalties as a man of unseemly and heterodox opinions.

For a long while British artists worked under restrictions hardly less rigid. What was demanded of them they supplied, but the demand that they should show to the public what nature is like was slow in coming. Word pictures of nature there were in plenty; a chorus of poets extolled her charm, but no one seemed to perceive that what they found so inspiring in their verse could be visualized and made apparent by the painters. When Herrick wrote:

"I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers, Of April, May, of June, and July flowers"

British artists were looking to Van Dyck as their leader, and were striving, as he did, to immortalize their contemporaries or to tell in paint purely human stories. The brooks and blossoms, birds and flowers did not claim their consideration or provide them with material for popular canvases, and it did not occur to them to paint the groves and twilights, the damasked meadows and the pebbly streams, which Herrick loved so well.

In fact, it was not until the eighteenth century that the representation of landscape subjects began to be recognized as a legitimate sphere of artistic activity. Even then what was required was a very dry and commonplace kind of topographical illustration--a certain number of people had developed an interest in British scenery and in the archaeological relics which were to be found in different parts of the country, and accordingly it became the fashion to collect pictures of famous "views" and of ruined abbeys and other ancient buildings. But in producing these pictures little scope was allowed to the artist for the exercise of his imagination or for the expression of any aesthetic sentiment. The more precise and careful he was in his statement of fact, the more accurate his paintings were as portraits of the places or objects chosen, the better were his clients satisfied. He had to do what photography does now--he had to make a more or less literal diagram of his subject with as much of the detail as he could contrive to set down and with as little display as possible of his personal taste or fancy.

However, out of this limited and mechanical beginning grew very quickly a school of landscape practice which substituted the wider study of nature for the record of topographical realities. A number of artists broke away from restrictions by which they felt themselves to be hampered, and they found a considerable section of the public prepared to countenance them in their effort to attain freer and more significant expression. They brought a new spirit into the art of the country, a spirit of inquiry and investigation, and they taught people to look more closely at nature's manifestations and to interest themselves intelligently in her elusive suggestions. In other words, they destroyed a convention which had been generally accepted, and in securing freedom for themselves to follow their personal inclinations towards a more rational treatment of nature they gained the sympathetic support of the many art lovers who had discovered how cramping the convention was, and how seriously it stood in the way of the right kind of development and progress.

The new school of landscape was deficient neither in enthusiasm nor energy. Men of marked originality and brilliant capacity rallied to it in large numbers, and with the vigorous initiative of pioneers in a land of promise set to work to make their discoveries effective. They wrested nature's secrets from her one by one, secrets of colour, secrets of illumination and light and shade, secrets and mysteries of ever-changing atmospheric effect. There were still "views" to paint, but instead of being treated as matters of dry topography they were used as subjects for pictures in which the painter's temperamental response to the inspiration he received was plainly manifested, and in which the impression made upon him by the motive in its various aspects was appropriately summed up. In a very short time the British landscape school became under the stimulus of the new thought and the new methods the most important in the world, and the most independent and progressive in its practice.

Anyhow, nearly all the earlier painters of marine subjects were men who had some particular reason for taking to this line of practice. One of the first--Charles Brooking, who was born in 1723--was brought up in Deptford Dockyard, and as a not unnatural consequence acquired considerable skill in the representation of shipping and naval incidents. During the latter part of his short life--he died at the age of thirty-six--he gave some instruction to Dominic Serres, a Frenchman by birth, who was a foundation member of the Royal Academy and was appointed to the post of Marine Painter to the King. Serres had been a sailor, and was captured by an English frigate in the war of 1752 when he was in command of a trading vessel; he settled in this country, and with Brooking's assistance and a good deal of hard work on his own part became a painter of repute. In his choice of the direction he followed in his art he was, like Brooking, influenced by his earlier associations and by the desire to treat pictorially material with which he was thoroughly conversant.

Another artist of this period who was almost exclusively a marine painter was Nicholas Pocock, born in 1741. He, too, had been at sea, and had commanded a sailing vessel before he adopted the profession of painting. Yet another was John Cleveley, born 1745, who is supposed to have been the son of a draughtsman in Deptford Dockyard, and who in his youth held some post there himself; and there was another Cleveley, Robert by name, born about the same time, who gained distinction by his pictures of naval engagements. He, again, had had previous experience at sea. Then there was Clarkson Stanfield, born at Sunderland in 1793, who went to sea in his boyhood, and was for a while in the Navy, until an accident cut short his career; his particular place in art was determined by the knowledge of his subject which he had gained before he turned to the profession of sea painter. And to the list can be added George Chambers, born at Whitby in 1803, the son of a seaman, and himself a sailor when he was not more than ten years old.

That men like these should have specialized in sea painting is not surprising. It is evident, by their later success as artists, that they had the faculty of observation and the capacity to visualize their impressions, and almost as a matter of course they were inclined to put into a pictorial form the matters with which they were so well acquainted. The sea had become a part of their lives, and of shipping they had an exact and technical knowledge; and they were in touch with people who were no strangers to the sea, and who in consequence demanded that it should be represented with fidelity and understanding. Everything combined to make them the leaders in a branch of practice which requires close and accurate insight, and their works in the early days of the nature study development set a standard of accomplishment which was helpful in the highest degree; a standard which might never have been reached if sea painting had been nothing more than the diversion of the landsman who now and again went for a sketching trip to the coast. The marine painters of our modern days who work with conscience and a love of completeness owe, perhaps, more than they realize to these predecessors of theirs who established the tradition of serious effort to get things right, and who built this tradition upon first-hand knowledge.

But to some extent it is to the example of these specialists that must also be ascribed the skill in sea painting that, as time went on, was attained by many of their contemporaries who did not deal systematically with this class of subject. The habitual landscape painter, accustomed to fixed forms and effects that followed more or less regular rules, might easily have drifted into a conventional representation of the sea if he had not been shown the way to look at it by the men who knew it intimately, and if works by these men had not existed to provide him with the means of testing his own achievement. For his own credit, however, he had to strive to compete with them in knowledge of the sea, and had to measure an understanding of it acquired by deliberate and conscious effort against theirs which had been obtained by prolonged and personal contact; and to uphold his reputation as a painter of capacity he had to prove that he could grasp the essentials of whatever type of material he might elect to handle. Therefore, the adoption of a convention, the inadequacy of which could have easily been demonstrated, would have been a confession either of want of conscience or of deficient intelligence, and would have reflected upon his claim to rank as an artist of distinction.

Turner was supreme because he, and he only, estimated at its full value the poetry and the majesty of the sea; because he alone could grasp its immensity and its tragic strength and yet be exquisitely in sympathy with its smiling serenity and placid calm. Turner saw and understood the drama of the sea, and by the largeness of his vision and the depth of his understanding he was enabled to present this drama in all its varieties of action. But then, Turner had not only "the eye of an eagle"--as Ruskin said of him--he had, too, the gift of imagination by which realities are transmuted into poetic suggestion. Accuracy of detail and plain statement of fact were the foundations on which his art was built , but the superstructure he erected was designed and arranged to express his own large conception of his motive as a whole, and to illustrate the workings of his own emotion. Therefore, when he painted the sea it was the appeal that his subjects made to his imagination that directed and established the final result; and how strong this appeal was can be judged from the amazing beauty and power of his accomplishment as a marine painter. Although it has been given to no other artist to rival or approach Turner in mastery of accomplishment, although it is difficult to believe that there can ever be another painter who will be able to claim equality with him in the same sphere of art, the stimulus of Turner's example must always be vividly felt by every true student of nature, and especially by every one who aspires to paint marine subjects in the right manner. For, certainly, the poetry of the sea and the drama of the sea are among the most salient of its characteristics, and there is surrounding it an atmosphere of sentiment that must be sympathetically perceived. A commonplace and matter-of-fact statement of wave forms would be about as worthless artistically as an architectural elevation of a mountain range, and the more coldly and scientifically correct it was the less would it convey of the spirit of the sea. The frame of mind in which the painter must assume his task must be akin to that of Thomson when he wrote:

"Thou, majestic main A secret world of wonders in thyself!"

and in this world of wonders he must be prepared always to find some new secret which will deepen his sense of the mystery of the sea and make him feel that with all his striving he has touched only the fringe of its romance. At no stage in his study will he be in a position to say that he has learned enough and that his subject has no more to reveal; every fresh discovery will open up to him new matters for investigation, and suggest other lines of thought.

Turner, at all events, never came to the conclusion that his knowledge of the sea was complete, for to the end of his life he maintained the freshness and variety of his interpretation. He gave to it, year by year, a deeper note of sentiment, responding always more directly to the impression he received, and eliminating everything that did not help in the attainment of his pictorial purpose. Detail at the last he almost entirely disregarded, concentrating the whole of his attention upon the main effect by which temperamentally he was inspired; but the things essential for the construction of his picture and for making clear the meaning of his motive he observed with the most scrupulous care. Even in his slightest and, seemingly, most casual notes of the sea there was the subtlest accuracy of vision, and there was the truest summing up of the story that was told by the particular phase of the subject he had chosen for the exercise or his powers as an interpreter of nature's message. Never did he descend to a formula or use a set convention to gain his dramatic result. It was partly for this reason that he stood so sublimely apart from his contemporaries; he did not repeat himself, while they were too often content to follow rules and to do over again things that they had discovered to be attractive to the public. Yet many of the artists of Turner's period were men of distinction and their sea paintings had satisfying merit and no small measure of inspiration. Stanfield suggested well the movement and action of the sea and was sensitive to its atmosphere; Copley Fielding saw and took the opportunities that the sea offered him for arranging graceful compositions and charming studies of light and shade, and he, too, had a sound understanding of wave movement; De Wint and David Cox, both masterly students of nature, painted the misty subtleties of the coast with masculine power and with the knowledge that comes only from prolonged and thoughtful observation; and others not less observant showed that the pictorial possibilities of the sea had by no means escaped them. But none of them arrived at Turner's magnificent disregard of limitations or approached him in dramatic strength, and certainly none of them had the courage to abandon, as he did, detailed reality for the sake of presenting a higher and more impressive truth.

That is why Turner's manner of representing the sea cannot be applied by lesser men. Without any disparagement of the many able marine painters who have practised since his time it can safely be said that on none of them his mantle has fallen. Certainly to none of them has been granted his rare endowment of intimate vision and profound imagination; certainly none has possessed that combination of exhaustive knowledge and perfect confidence which made him so consummately a master of his craft. There have been in the recent past, there are at work to-day, artists who have studied the sea in the most sympathetic spirit and whose seriousness of effort deserves the highest praise, artists whose accomplishment would be wholly satisfying if Turner had not shown so brilliantly the greater possibilities of sea painting; but theirs is a limited and specialized view beside that of their great predecessor. It is as well, however, that they do not try to do too much. To paint the abstract drama of the sea in the only way that can be made convincing, the possession of a temperament is absolutely essential, but this temperament must be schooled and disciplined by lifelong study or the drama will degenerate into incredible fantasy. Turner was temperamentally fitted to attempt the highest flights, and with his perfect technical equipment nothing was beyond his reach. Other artists must be content to admire his poetic power without aspiring to rival it. But, after all, honest, well-educated, serious prose is better than incoherent poetry, no matter how well-intentioned that may be; and certainly the prose of many of our modern sea painters is very good indeed--clear, logical, and distinguished by a true sense of style--and into much of it comes that touch of poetic feeling that gives charm and picturesqueness to the descriptive statement.

To illustrate the difference between these two types of sea painting the work of Henry Moore can appropriately be instanced. He was, next to Turner, the most learned and accomplished student of marine motives and the finest exponent of the facts of the sea whom any school has produced. But beside the dramatic poetry of Turner his art was prose, fine prose, persuasive and dignified, but never rising into inspired fancy. In other words, he saw nobly and beautifully, but Turner saw and imagined as well, and the more he saw the more splendidly did he use his imagination.

Yet Henry Moore has indisputably his place among the masters because his art, though not profoundly imaginative, was as able in achievement as it was accurate in observation. Moreover, he was acutely responsive to the sentiment of nature, and interpreted her in her many moods with exquisite discretion. Frank and straightforward as his work always was, it never lacked the direction of a sympathetic mind; its strength was controlled by a singularly correct sense of artistic propriety and was never allowed to degenerate into mere display of executive cleverness. Certainly Henry Moore was a fine craftsman, and was not hampered by technical difficulties in the practice of his art; indeed, one of the most salient characteristics of his pictures, as we see them to-day, is the confidence of the handling by which they are distinguished.

This confidence, this directness of method, was the outcome of a not less confident understanding of the material with which he was accustomed to deal. The things he knew were to him matters of such complete knowledge that he was able to concentrate himself entirely upon the pictorial realization of them without having to make experiments or calculations to prove whether or not his assumptions were correct. Wisely, too , he did not aim at possibilities which he honestly recognized as being beyond his reach. Facts and realities he could grasp, subtle shades of fact and delicate variations of reality he could express with discriminating subtlety and sensitive delicacy, but to conceive a vision in which actual nature would be turned into a gloriously fanciful abstraction was outside the range of his personality. So he kept to the path which it was right that he should tread, and made no excursions into strange places in the domain of art, proving himself thereby a master of himself as well as of his art.

We have every reason to be grateful to him for his solid and well-balanced common sense. Henry Moore as an imitator of Turner, following in the wake of a leader whom he could never overtake, would have been a wasted force in art. Henry Moore as a painter true to his own convictions, striving earnestly to set before us his extraordinarily intimate view of the sea, has established a standard against which the achievements of our modern sea painters can be measured most instructively, and has pointed out the principles on which these painters must work if they are to justify their effort. Knowledge such as Turner possessed is by its very vastness incomprehensible to the ordinary man; but knowledge like that which Henry Moore gathered is possible to other artists, though to few of them is given his capacity to express it, and to fewer still his sureness of touch and his command of executive method.

What is particularly to be learned from Henry Moore's pictures is the wide variety of matters which have to be studied by the men who aspire to paint the sea with a sufficient measure of artistic fitness. There are, of course, many ways of representing the sea pictorially--as a background or setting to some nautical incident; as an accessory in a scene which has humanity for its main interest; as a generalized scheme of colour or tone; as a decorative motive with conventionalized forms; or as a poetically indefinite fantasy in which nearly everything is left to the imagination of the beholder. But the most scholarly and serious way--Henry Moore's way--is to analyse and dissect; to account for every variation in form and every changing gleam of colour; to find the reasons for each of the many kinds of wave movement; to learn the connexion between certain conditions of the weather and certain states of the sea; to know how to produce a sea picture which will be logical throughout and without contradictions of atmospheric effect which are calculated to excite the protests of the marine expert who knows his subject and is not inclined to take artistic licence into consideration. Henry Moore spared himself none of these exhaustive preparations and had the technical skill to make the outcome of them wholly attractive in artistic quality; that is why he ranks as a master at whose feet it is good for the would-be sea painter to sit in all humility.

If a series of his pictures is examined it will be seen at once that in each one some special problem is dealt with and some definite phase of the sea is taken as the motive. Unthinking people are apt to say that sea paintings are monotonous because they lack incident and variety of subject, because they are nothing but waves and sky, but this objection implies an unobservant habit of mind. Henry Moore did not repeat himself, and among the most personal characteristics of his work was its breadth of outlook, a breadth of outlook which was developed by his constant search for fresh impressions. Although he had not had, like Stanfield or Chambers, a professional connexion with the sea, he was frequently afloat and always trying to enlarge his experience of his subject. He had, too, the gift of very rapid technical expression which enabled him to set down what he saw while the impression was vividly in his mind, so that his first clear conviction was not modified or obscured by mechanical causes--by that prolongation of effort which leads to an ill-assorted mixing of ideas and an indecisive manner of statement.

This combination of instantaneous apprehension and unhesitating expression is, indeed, a necessity for the artist who wishes to avoid a merely conventional rendering of the sea and who is anxious to suggest properly its really infinite variety. There is so much that must be done quickly, there are such incessant changes of effect and condition, that the deliberate worker, thinking slowly and using his appliances unreadily, is always in danger of being left with his intention unrealized. He sees something that appeals to him as a good subject and he begins to study it in all seriousness; but before he has grasped its meaning, and before he has more than the first few careful touches on his canvas, the effect that stirred him has gone, and in its place there is something else that is surprisingly different. No wonder if unable to keep pace with nature's elusive tricks he becomes after a while hopelessly bewildered and gives up the struggle in despair. Possibly, being a conscientious person, he decides to paint one aspect only of the sea and to specialize in one type of subject which he can master by long and laborious practice; or, being less particular, he builds up a pretty convention which will help him to turn out superficially attractive things that will please a none too critical public. But in neither way is the great sea painter made, the painter who can tell the story of the sea and convey to us its sentiment and its character.

What makes the problems of marine painting so complex is, first of all, the fact that the sea is never in absolute repose, and therefore its surface forms are constantly undergoing some degree of change. Another difficulty is that the sea-water seems to vary in composition and consistency according to the conditions under which it is viewed; at one time it is solid, opaque, ponderous, and sombre in colour, and at another it is light, transparent and full of delicate tints. As it is a reflecting substance as well as one through which light can pass it alters in appearance in the most surprising manner under the incidence of sunlight or in response to the variations in atmospheric effect; and as it is a moving body it appears to be subject to no laws of construction and to have no sort of method in its restlessness. Most people, indeed, would hold that the cynical comment on womankind, "Toujours femme varie, souvent elle est folle," could be applied with particular appropriateness to the sea, so feminine is it in its charming irresponsibility.

Yet the student of the sea can, if he sets to work in the right way, discover the sources of its irresponsibility and the reasons for its lapses into insanity. He can dissect its forms and learn its anatomical construction, and he can find out what regulates and determines its movements. He can establish a direct agreement between the apparent texture of the sea and the bottom over which it flows, as well as between its surface character and the nature of the weather. And having dissected and analysed, having investigated and arranged his discoveries in the proper order, he can solve pictorial problems which ordinary men would count as puzzles to which there was no key. With this knowledge at his disposal he would be able, too, to paint pictures which would show the sea as it is and as it can be, not as an erratic and unaccountable phenomenon acting contrary to all natural laws, which is the view given of it by the artists who are incautious enough to paint it without having learned its ways.

For instance, the painter properly equipped would make the right distinction, both in colour and wave form, between the deep sea and that in shallow places; between the transparency of waves breaking on a rocky coast and those on a sandy beach; between the wave action in a tidal current moving with or against the wind; or between the seas that are penned in a narrow channel and those that are running free in wide spaces. These are elementary matters, perhaps, in the study of marine painting, but elementary or not they are only too often misapprehended by the careless observer; and they are typical of a host of others which are not less likely to become pitfalls for the unwary. Neglect of them leads to slovenly and unsatisfactory production and to a kind of work that may be cheaply effective but that has actually no justification for existence.

One mistake very often made by men who have not carried their studies far enough is to miss the necessary connexion between the state of the sea and the accompanying condition of the atmosphere; another is to paint in a sea picture a sky that is in wrong relation to the wave movement. Both these errors arise from the failure of the painter to study his subject as a whole, from his inexperience of what may be called the technical peculiarities of his material. He has by him a sea note that seems worth treating on a more ambitious scale, and he finds in his portfolio a sketch of a sky that composes nicely and is quite attractive in its general character; so he mixes the two together and calls the compilation a marine painting. But, really, unless by some lucky chance the two sketches happened to have been done under similar weather conditions the picture would be no more true to nature than the laboured effort of the "art" photographer who prints his sky from one negative and his landscape from another; or who grafts a studio-lighted figure on to a background photographed out of doors.

The sea painter must, for the credit of art, keep clear of such silly tricks and mechanical devices. He must be logical both in his observations and in the use he makes of them, and he must be consistent in his statement of the facts before him. A picture in which the sea suggests half a gale while the sky is one which would be seen only in a dead calm is an obvious absurdity, and it would be not less ridiculous to paint the full colours of sunlight in an atmosphere of mist and driving rain; yet these things are done by artists from whom more regard for truth is to be expected. Lapses of this sort cannot be forgiven; they imply a shirking of responsibility that is beyond excuse, and a failure to grasp the first principles of nature study. They would never occur if the men who paint the sea would regard it as a living reality which responds to the influence of its surroundings and varies its appearance as circumstances dictate, and if they would recognize that it has its own anatomical structure by which its movements are controlled. There is a reason for everything it does and there is a way of accounting for every aspect it assumes, but the reason has to be sought for, and the way to necessary knowledge must be pursued with painstaking effort. There is no place in marine painting for the man who wants to take things easily.

But any one who is interested in executive problems which demand concentrated attention and sustained investigation will find plenty to tax his fullest energies--problems of drawing, of colour and tone management, of imitative suggestion, and of technical application. As an example of a complex motive which would present a series of difficulties a picture might be imagined of the sea washing in among rocks, some of which are submerged while others stand up above the surface, the water clear and transparent and neither smooth nor much agitated. Through the water the objects beneath would be clearly seen and the surface would reflect the rocks above and catch gleams of light from the sky, and the movement of the small waves swinging towards the rocks and rebounding from them, and eddying over the shallow places, would make a pattern of lines and planes set at all sorts of angles. To realize such a subject adequately an almost perfect balance of observation would be needed. Too much attention given to the under-water details would destroy the suggestion of the surface; too much concentration on the surface lights and reflections would make the water seem opaque; exaggeration of the lines and planes of the ripples would diminish the breadth of effect and alter the character of the subject. The painter must perceive that this problem has many sides, and that each one must receive exactly its right amount of consideration if the pictorial solution is to be correct; if he has to make a compromise with reality the most subtle judgment will be required of him to create an illusion that will look like truth.

To multiply such examples would be easy, for there is no phase of sea painting in which difficulties do not abound. It is difficult to paint a breaking wave, to preserve its architectural quality of design and its appearance of massive strength, and yet to show that it is a moving and momentary thing disappearing as quickly as it is formed. It is difficult to represent the confusion of a stormy sea, churned into foam and tossing in the wildest turmoil, and yet to make intelligible the order and regularity of its movement and the right sequence of its changing forms. It is as difficult to render the smoothness of calm, quiet water without making it look solid and opaque, dull and lifeless, as it is to suggest the liveliness of a breezy day without lapsing into meaningless repetition and restless pattern-making. Every successful sea picture is a difficulty overcome and a problem solved, and every successful sea painter is a man who has struggled earnestly with intractable material and has built his achievement on a foundation of laboriously acquired knowledge. Probably that is why there have been comparatively few great sea painters; it is certainly a reason why the few who can be accounted great should be regarded as masters of the highest rank with places of distinction in the history of art.

Next in importance to the study of the sea itself comes the acquisition of a capacity to paint shipping, the two do not necessarily go together. There have been many capable painters of the sea who could not draw a ship and did not know how to set it on the water; and there have been many men with an accurate technical knowledge of shipping whose treatment of the sea from the pictorial point of view left much to be desired. As a matter of fact, a ship provides one of the severest tests of draughtsmanship; it is such a complicated collection of lines and curves and so hard to put in proper perspective that it makes exceptional demands upon the artist's powers. Moreover, every ship has its own individuality, a character peculiar to itself, and to express this individuality as much analytical effort is needed as to draw the right distinction between the differing types of humanity. Details which to the unprofessional eye seem of no significance must be carefully attended to because each one of them contributes something to the sum total of fact and helps to make the character intelligible, and to slur over these details is a fatal mistake. A ship treated conventionally and without personal insight is as uninspiring pictorially as a portrait which has missed all the little human characteristics which made the sitter interesting.

Unfortunately it is rather too easy to produce instances of the wrong handling of ships in sea pictures, which otherwise are quite acceptable, and of imperfect understanding of the action of vessels afloat. Some of the earlier masters who had studied the sea and knew its ways well made curious mistakes when they brought in a ship as a central feature in their composition. They would fairly often poise a craft of much solidity and considerable tonnage on the very crest of a wave where there was certainly not a sufficient body of water to support it; or they would put a ship so close to a gently shelving beach that there was an obvious and immediate danger of its running aground, a position that would alarm even the boldest of sailors. They were as a rule cheerfully ignorant of the intricacies of rigging and of the set of sails, and occasionally they seemed to credit a ship with an uncanny power of progressing at full speed in the teeth of a stiff breeze. All this resulted from inadequate study of technicalities that a seafaring man would treat as a matter of course--from insufficient acquaintance with things that, after all, scarcely came within the scope of a landsman's experience.

But the present-day painter is expected to be more precise; and if he does not fulfil this expectation he will find that there are plenty of people who are ready and willing to call him to account. He has to face a more critical generation than his predecessors knew, a generation which travels more and has much wider opportunities of acquiring knowledge of many subjects, and he has to reckon with a familiarity with marine details that has become an eminently British characteristic. Picturesque improbabilities would not be left unquestioned now; there would be scathing comments by nautical experts, and even the ordinary man would not hesitate to voice his doubts. Perhaps we have grown a little pedantic in this demand for strict reality, but, all the same, it is not unreasonable to require from the painter who puts a ship into his picture evidence that he knows a fair amount about that ship's construction and how it should behave in the situation he assigns to it. Even a piece of imaginative fantasy is none the worse for being based judiciously on solid fact.

Beside the purely marine painting, the picture that is concerned solely with the sea and ships that sail on it, there is a place for the coast subject. It is true that the coast scene is, more often than not, only a landscape into which the sea is introduced as a subsidiary interest, but under this heading can be included also those views of harbours, estuaries, cliffs, and beaches, which many painters have treated with distinction of style and charm of sentiment. Yet even the coast scene in which the actual nearness of the sea is only suggested owes its character to the sea. Only the sea could have carved those cliffs into their impressive shapes, or could have piled up those masses of huge rocks. Only the winds which blow in from the sea could have moulded that range of sand dunes or could have twisted those stunted trees into their curiously picturesque forms. Only as a protection against the savage strength of the sea has that breakwater been built behind which the fleet of fishing boats lies in shelter. And from the sea come those driving mists and slow-moving banks of fog which throw a veil of mystery over the landscape and give a new aspect to even the most familiar objects. The scent of the sea is in the air, the sound of its waves is unceasing, its influence is all about; the coast is, indeed, but the subject of the sea and owes to it allegiance.

It is in this spirit, unquestionably, that many artists have painted the coast, with a sense of the dominating power of the sea and a conscious acknowledgement of its influence. They have appreciated the dramatic value of the persistent struggle between the sea and the land, a struggle of which the evidences are not to be mistaken; and they have felt the nature of the resistance which the land, an unwilling subject, offers to the encroachments of its tyrant. Even in pictures which represent the coast in its most peaceful moments, when the sea ripples lazily round the rocks under the light of the summer sun, the scars left by the assaults of waves driven by past storms cannot be concealed. Fragments torn from the cliffs strew the shore, the wreckage of the land is heaped up waiting for the inevitable moment when the sea, renewing its attack, will swallow up what it has already half destroyed. The note of tragedy is always present, there is always a suggestion that the sea is merely waiting its opportunity and that when the time comes it will rend and overwhelm and assert its ruthlessness without mercy or restraint.

The same kind of sentiment marks the picture of the harbour subject in which man's conflict with the sea is illustrated. Humanity is perpetually at war with the forces of nature, and is always seeking to keep them in check, with, at best, only partial success. Incessant watchfulness is necessary, constant effort to repair what is as constantly wrecked and overthrown, unwearying patience and unceasing toil. Often man sees something he has done blotted out utterly by nature's act, and he has to start again and build up anew from the very beginning, knowing as he builds that he is defying a power stronger than himself, more patient than he is and more serenely confident of ultimate success. Yet he goes on with his work, patching, renewing, rebuilding, and fighting stubbornly every step forward or back.

That is why there is an element of romance in the picture which has for its motive something that men have constructed to protect themselves against the inroads of the sea, some piece of work that suggests the shifts and contrivances used to secure a measure of shelter from the violence of the waves and the fury of the storm. The story which such a picture has to tell is full of significance because the facts presented by the artist sum up a series of human activities and throw light upon the conditions under which these activities have been carried on. It is a story, too, with an appeal because it shows a phase of human endurance which deserves sympathy and respect, sympathy for the difficulties encountered, and respect for the way in which they have been overcome; and it has its full measure of picturesqueness and artistic fitness by which its claim to serious treatment is amply justified.

Indeed, the paintings of the fringe and surrounding of the sea which have been produced by British artists uphold worthily the best traditions of our school; they include much that proves indisputably the powers of our greater masters, and certainly they are more numerous than the pictures of the open sea. That this should be is scarcely surprising for, after all, the painters who risk the perils of the deep even for brief excursions are much fewer than those who wander along the coast in search of material, and to most men the combination of land and sea offers more attractive problems than the less-known waste of waters. Moreover, there is a wider public for the coast scene , because the great majority of people gain their impressions of the sea by looking at it from the land and but rarely seek for experiences afloat. The purely marine subject seen intimately and interpreted finely offers opportunities for a higher type of achievement, and in some respects calls for more concentrated study; but where the land and sea meet there is a more obvious variety of pictorial suggestions and the touch of romantic sentiment is more apparent. It is not given to many people, artists or laymen, to feel the profound mystery and the dramatic grandeur of the open sea; there are plenty, however, who can sense the appeal of the broken and battered coast and find romance in the harbours and tidal inlets.

From a purely technical standpoint the coast picture is also more convenient than the painting of the open sea; it is easier to compose satisfactorily and to arrange in proper order. As a matter of space-filling and pattern-making it is much less difficult to construct a design with the vertical or sloping lines of cliffs or rocks contrasting with the horizontals of the sea than it is when the picture is divided into sea and sky with nothing to break the severe simplicity of the composition. This technicality has evidently perplexed many sea painters, and has not infrequently led them into rather strained devices to obtain variety--into exaggeration of the tones of the sky and over-accentuation of cloud forms, or into the introduction of shipping where the subject was already too complicated to require an added interest. Such evasions of a difficulty by artificial means are, however, not to be defended, and the artist who feels that the purely marine picture is too great a tax upon his powers had better not stray from the coast where there is plenty of more amenable pictorial material at his disposal. He is a wise man who recognizes his own limitations and does not invite trouble by trying to conceal his deficiencies in a branch of practice for which he is unsuited.

There is another type of art which can be brought legitimately under the heading of marine painting--the representation of the life of the people who have dealings with the sea and obtain from it their means of existence. The sailors, the fisher-folk, the many who work by and on the sea have their part in its story and provide the artist with ample matter by which this story can be appropriately illustrated. They live picturesquely and they are admirably in harmony with their surroundings; they work hard, but in the freedom of the open air, and they are not cramped within the walls of the shop or factory. In their occupation there is always the spice of adventure and there are many moments of danger, many tragic happenings, and many incidents which test severely both mind and body. But all this develops character and sets its stamp upon the seaman's personality, marking with signs that cannot be mistaken his place in the community.

Clearly, in marine painting there is no lack of opportunities. In its various branches it offers to the artist room for the most divergent activities and it allows him a spacious field for the exercise of his powers. If he aspires to conquer difficulties they are there in plenty, difficulties which have to be met with courage and handled with discretion. If he is content with simple tasks there are many which will occupy him agreeably and be well worth working out. If he is a serious student of nature's manifestations they are set before him in profusion, and the whole array of her mysteries is paraded for his instruction; and if humanity is his subject, all the actors in the drama of sea life are there to inspire him with their doings and to stir his imagination with the record of their achievements. Always the contact with the sea brings him something fresh that leads him into new trains of thought and suggests to him new ways of applying his technical skill; but always the demand is made upon him that he should put forth the whole of his effort to reach and maintain the highest standard of artistic practice. There is no place in marine painting for the man who, taking the line of least resistance, seeks by compromise and convention to gloss over his want of knowledge and tries by superficial cleverness of handling to divert attention from the incompleteness of his analysis. An artist of this sort had better let the sea alone and choose something simpler and less abounding with pitfalls for his inexperience.

From Copley Fielding to Edwin Hayes is a wide step--a jump from the methods of the past to those of the present day. Yet in actual time the two men were not so widely separated, for Hayes was born some while before Fielding died, and counted several of the earlier British masters among his older contemporaries. Fielding, however, was brought up in a tradition which had a strong hold upon the painters who were working at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and he made no real effort to break away from it, though in his interpretation of it he was, in some respects, less narrow than his fellows. But the formula influenced him as it did nearly all the other men of that date, and it gave a sort of set pattern to the paintings even of those artists who had the sincerest possible desire to be faithful to nature and to study her seriously and persistently.

The effect of this formula was to regulate the composition and to prescribe the introduction of shipping in certain specified positions so as to conform to an accepted pictorial convention. To its dominance is due the general similarity which can be perceived between the works of John Wilson, Chambers, Crawford, and M?ller, here illustrated, and which could be followed out in many other pictures by the lesser painters of the time--a similarity which was neither accidental nor unconscious, but directly induced by adherence to what were held to be the correct principles of picture designing. Moreover, there seems to have been a belief then that a painting of the sea must have some added interest to assure it of popularity, for a sea without shipping prominently placed upon it was hardly ever attempted; an incident was almost always introduced or a story suggested.

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