Famous Seascape Paintings

What a seascape is

Marine art, or maritime art, is figurative art that portrays or draws its main inspiration from the sea. Maritime painting is a genre depicting vessels and the sea, and it was particularly strong from the 17th to the 19th centuries. In practice the term covers art showing shipping on rivers and estuaries, scenes on the shore, and any work with a boat in it, without rigid distinction. Strictly speaking, maritime art should always include some element of human seafaring, whereas marine art would also include pure seascapes without any human element.

That last sentence is the useful one for a buyer. A picture of an empty ocean and a picture of a working harbor are both here, and they behave completely differently on a wall. The empty one is weather and light. The busy one is a story.

Famous seascape paintings

These are the pictures people ask for by name, and each can be ordered as a hand-painted reproduction in oil on canvas.

• Impression, sunrise, an 1872 painting first shown at what became known as the Exhibition of the Impressionists in Paris in April 1874. It is credited with inspiring the name of the movement, and it depicts a harbor at dawn with almost nothing in it.
• The Slave Ship, originally titled Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhon coming on, first exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1840. Joseph Mallord William Turner, known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic artist who raised the standing of landscape and is considered a precursor of Impressionism and one of the greatest and most influential British painters.
• The Fighting Temeraire by the same hand, a warship under tow at sunset.
• Rain, Steam and Speed, the Great Western Railway subject, where rain and weather do more than the train.
• Eight Bells, The Life Line and West Point, Prout's Neck by Winslow Homer. Homer's sea is the most physical in the whole genre, and these three are the landscape pictures the American shore is known by.
• Gloucester Harbor, the quieter side of the same stretch of water.
• The Seine with a Rowing Boat and Starry Night Over the Rhone by Vincent van Gogh, water at two different hours.
• At the seashore by Volodymyr Orlovsky and At Moscow-river by Isaac Levitan.
• Seaside Picnic by Maurice Prendergast and Idle Hours by William Merritt Chase, the shore as leisure rather than labor.
• Evening on the Loire by Felix Vallotton and Sunset by Claude Monet.
• Church-Goers Arriving by Boat by Wilhelm Marstrand and Arrival of St. Ursula by Vittore Carpaccio.

The great painters of the sea

Three names carry this genre. Joseph Mallord William Turner leads it, and he is the most extreme: by the end of his life a ship in a Turner is barely a ship, and the subject is light itself. Ivan Aivazovsky comes next. He was a Russian Romantic painter considered one of the greatest masters of the genre, baptized as Hovhannes Aivazian, born to Armenian parents in the Black Sea port of Feodosia in Crimea and mostly based there. His best-known work is The Ninth Wave, an 1850 canvas.

Winslow Homer changed what the genre could be about. Turner gives you the sublime and Aivazovsky gives you the storm, but Homer's pictures are about people at work in a cold sea, and a wave in one of them has weight rather than theater.

Claude Monet belongs at the edge of the group. He was a French painter and the founder of Impressionism, seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it, and his 1872 harbor picture gave a whole movement its name. Rembrandt appears once and only once: The Storm on the Sea of Galilee of 1633, a history painting of the biblical miracle in which Jesus calmed the storm, is his only known seascape.

Waves, weather and the problem of water

The sea is the hardest thing in painting for a simple reason: it has no color and no shape of its own. Everything you see in it is borrowed from the sky above and the light passing through, so a seascape is really a picture of air with a surface in the way.

That is why the good ones look wet and the weak ones look like a green field. Three things separate them. One is the horizon, which has to be absolutely level and absolutely soft, because a hard horizon kills the distance. Another is the wave face, where light comes through from behind rather than bouncing off the front. The last is the foam, which is not white: it is the color of the sky, slightly warmer.

When the approval photo arrives, look at those three. If the horizon is soft, the waves glow from behind and the foam is not chalk, the whole ocean will be right.

Harbors and the edge of the water

Not every picture here is open water. A large part of this collection sits at the edge: a harbor, a quay, a shingle strand, a river mouth. In practice the genre covers shipping on rivers and estuaries as well as the open water, and those pictures are the ones most people end up buying.

The reason is practical. An open ocean picture is a mood and needs space around it. A harbor scene has buildings, vessels and figures, so it reads at close range and holds a smaller wall. Gloucester Harbor, Idle Hours and Seaside Picnic are all in that family.

The century that made the genre

The great age of this subject runs from the 17th century to the 19th, and it is worth knowing what drove it, since the reasons were commercial before they were dramatic. Sea trade created the demand: a merchant who owned a share in a ship wanted a picture of it, and a port city with new money wanted landscape views of itself. The pictures were bought as records of a place and of a livelihood.

The Romantic century then turned the same subject into something else. Instead of depicting a named vessel in a named harbor, artists went after the natural beauty and the terror of the open sea, and were inspired by both, which is how you get the dramatic storm pieces and the shipwrecks. Turner is the hinge between the two, and Aivazovsky is what happens after.

The Impressionists arrived last and did something new again. They stopped caring about the ship entirely and painted the light on the water at a particular hour, which is why Impression, Sunrise looks unfinished to anyone expecting the older kind of picture. All three approaches are here, and the difference between them matters more for your wall than the century does.

What to look for in a reproduction

A long horizontal view of open water is one of the hardest things to copy well, because there is nowhere to hide. In a portrait a weak passage sits next to a strong one. In an empty ocean every square inch is the same problem repeated, and the studio has to keep the transition from sky to sea alive across the whole width.

Look for three things and you will capture most of the difference. The sky should get lighter towards the horizon rather than darker. The surface should get lighter towards you, not away from you. And the reflected light should sit in a soft vertical column under the sun rather than spreading sideways. Those rules are how the eye knows it is looking at a real surface, and a copy that breaks them looks wrong even to someone who cannot say why.

Choosing a seascape for a room

Start with the hour of the day. A dawn picture goes warm and orange and lifts a cold room. A midday shore scene is pale, blue and green and needs daylight to work. A sunset or a night piece is dark and wants a lamp, whatever time of day you look at it. Get that right and almost anything else will be fine.

Then think about width. The sea is a horizontal subject, so these pictures reward the wider sizes more than any other group in the catalog, and a seascape at the smallest size loses the one thing it is for, which is distance.

Then decide whether you want people in it. A picture with figures is a story you will keep reading. A picture without them is a space you can put your attention into, a quieter pleasure and usually the better choice for a bedroom.

How each reproduction is made

One studio artist works from the museum reference in oil on canvas, building the sky first, then the surface, then the foam and the highlights last, which is the order these were originally built. Nothing here is printed or transferred. Seven sizes are available with an optional frame, and you approve a photo of the finished work before it ships. Free worldwide shipping and 90-day returns apply.

Browse related collections

The sea divides into several smaller groups in the catalog.

• Open water pictures for the sea without a shore.
• Sand and bathers for the tide line.
• Vessels under sail for the maritime subject proper.
• Fishing scenes for labor on the water.
• Land and water views for the parent group.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between marine and maritime art? Strictly speaking maritime art should always include some element of human seafaring, while the marine label also takes in pure seascapes with no human presence. In practice the terms overlap, and both cover shipping on rivers and estuaries as well as the open sea.

When was the great age of sea painting? The genre was particularly strong from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and most of the paintings on this page come from those centuries.

Are these prints? No. Each is an original oil on canvas made by hand by a studio artist, in seven sizes, with an optional frame and a photo of the finished work for your approval before it ships.