Marine Painting

Like many pictorial genres, the maritime art has become an independent direction of pictorial art in the 17th century in Holland. There, in the country of sailors and fishermen, seascapes were very popular. And while the artist Cornelis Hendriksz Vroom depicted naval battles, his compatriot Jan Porcellis created his paintings, considering that the sea can be painted for the beauty of the sea itself. Later, the Venetians Canaletto and Guardi created their own version of the marine painting, where the main object was still Venice, washed by the salt waters of the Adriatic.

The artist Claude Lorrain painted the sea in the context of the port facilities or mythological scenes, but his successor, William Turner, made the sea the main subject of his paintings, saturating the sky above it with sunlight, for which the impressionists Manet, Monet, Seurat, Signac eventually loved him... But the first artist we think of, when we hear the word “marine” art, can be Ivan Aivazovsky, whose oeuvre counts more than 6000 paintings, most of which depict the indomitable water element of the sea, proud contours of sailing ships and picturesque ports.