Art and the Ocean

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLII, Issue 20509, 29 August 1936, Page 12

Art and the Ocean

IMPRESSIVE POWER AND BEAUTY

boundless, endless, and sublime The image of Eternity, the throne Of the Invisible . . . • —Byron. Until the nineteenth century (writes Enid N. Macdonald in “The Sydney Morning Herald”), the sea, surely the most profoundly sublime of all the elements of nature, was not worthily interpreted by painters. In ancient art, indicated by merely symbolic lines —in Early Renaissance pictures used as background in figure compositions—the sea became, in the paintings of the classic school, an idealised creation which, by the revolt of early nineteenth century art, was translated into the emotion-stressed plaything of the Romanticists. But the sea not being expressed by either the heroic vistas of the Classicists or the semi-human portrayals of the Romanticists, there arose a group of painters imbued with the sincere desire to paint the sea faithfully; but their outlook was intensely poetic, and their pictures revealed their thoughts of the sea rather than its true nature. Then evolved the more definite style of the Realists and the sea received recognition as an individual theme. Later the Impressionists, discarding many of the facts of the Realists, justified their own elusive title in their sea-pictures. Few artists have loved the ocean intensely enough, or possessed the ability, to fully delineate its vastness and power, many compromising by avoiding the great reaches of sky and water of the high seas and picturing shore scenes, harbour entrances, and shipping subjects. In the sea paintings of Gustave Courbet—the French Realist—there is no such compromise. Henry Moore, R.A., the English painter of sea-truth, freed his art from traditions, and Winslow Homer, N.A., America’s dramatic representative in the realm of marine art, rarely used a human theme in his seascapes. Lover of the Sea Courbet loved deeply and fiercely. What he loved he understood completely and painted vastly. Only when he could say “I am moved” did he attain his true mastership. His own face, it might be, which momentarily awakened his love, then a self-portrait resulted, vividly characteristic, showing strong, regular features, luxuriant dark hair and beard, deep compelling eyes and flexible mouth. From many such portraits we have learned to know this Franche-Comte peasant, the uncompromising “Painter of Omans.” The majority of his contemporaries failed to comprehend his personality or his art, for braggart mannerisms effectively concealed this master craftsman and sensitive artist from the restless post-revolutionary world of France. Condemned for his extraordinary actions and sentiments, he died an exile at Vevy, Switzerland. In his peculiarity of outlook, but in his land-scapes and sea-scapes he paints at Courbet, master of form, released from affectation and social and political doctrines.

With sculptural simplicity Courbet painted in epic grandeur, “La Vague.” The uprearing waves with their jadelike harmonies, crash toward a rocky foreground. The horizon line is faultlessly placed and the sky storm-swept A smaller picture, “L’lmmensite,” tells no less powerfully of the spirit of a seemingly limitless ocean. Viewed as by one actually buffeted by the waves —it is unique. In “La Vague Aux Trois arques,” Courbet again recorded eternal massiveness. The sea at Havre, and Trouville lives in his art.

Moore, finely intellectual, with a heritage of artistry, studied the causes of natural phenomena, and achieved in his seascapes a sense of balance between science and art and a perfect rhythm. He disregarded imagination, but his deep interest in and love for the sea, created an atmos-

pheric setting for the wealth of everchanging colour, translucency, texture, form, and tumultuous movement, which his abnormally receptive vision enabled him to record. Cruising on the Mediterranean Sea, in the English Channel, round the coasts of Cornwall, Scotland, Ireland and France, he painted the sea while on the sea. Thorough in all that he undertook, he grasped the essential characteristics of a coastline or a climatic change. In “Winter Gale,” waves, flawed and broken by storm-winds, crests driven in flying spray, advance in long curved ridges toward a steep slope of sand; they mirror the storm-darkened sky. As in nature, there is no chaos, but power, controlled. “Rough Weather, Mediterranean,” with high horizon, and vividly-leaping, foam-capped waves deeply- shadowed by clouded skies, is vibrant. In “Clearness After Rain” the azure open sea, drawn and painted consummately, shimmers toward the sharply accentuated horizon, where it rests against an infinitely blue sky with distantly rolling cumuli. The heat-hazed “Summer Breeze in the Channel,” and “Mist and Sunshine,” with its intangible sun-warmed veil over a silver sea which breaks in a heavy swell in the foreground, are replicas of Nature. Heart of the Waves Homer, with fisher-folk in his ancestry, chose for his theme the eternal thunderous onslaught of waves against the edges of a continent. His is a physical conception of world force, wild, stark, primitive; cosmic energy devoid of human element. His sense of bulk and texture, fine and accurate, carries more of force than form. Attaining to the zenith of his powers late in life, after his retreat to an isolated Scarboro crag on the Maine coast, he interpreted the northern seas in uninterrupted solitude for thirtyfive years, increasing in skill as an artist until his death at the age of 74 years. This unique veteran shared with his contemporaries, Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, the power to see and feel originally, transcendentally. “The Maine Coast” is a drama, with the elements as players; the language is universal, the theme as old as the ocean. In ponderous isolation, Atlantic waves lash rock strata, foaming crests shrouded in mist and spindrift. In “Weather-beaten,” the wash of water in the foreground is backed by tossing waves on sharp rocks. “Coast in Winter” shows an icy wave turning above a powerful swell of water. “Cannon Rock,” full of motion and blue-green splendour, has a wonderfully placed horizon. In “Early Morning After Storm” the weary, ragged sea heaves in spent power.