ORIGINS 1500–1600
In late Renaissance art and visual culture, shipwreck imagery emerged as an independent theme that was distinct from so-called history painting which focused above all on ancient historical, biblical and classical narratives. By 1600, Italian, Dutch and Flemish artists painted the sea not just as a backdrop to such elevated subjects and events but as the main visual component. Another significant development at this time was the tendency for marine painting to focus on contemporary or near contemporary subjects, a trend that has continued to the present day.
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Venetian rebel Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) Saint Mark Saving a Saracen from Shipwreck (San Marco salva un saraceno durante un naufragio) 1562–1566
Executed between 1562 and 1566, along with Saint Mark’s Body Brought to Venice (Accademia, Venice) and Finding the Body of Saint Mark now at Brera, this largescale history painting by the Venetian Renaissance artist Jacopo Robusti (1518– 1594), depicts the miraculous rescuing of a Saracen by St Mark, invoked during a storm. The term ‘history painting’ was introduced in the 17th century to describe paintings with subject matter drawn from classical history and mythology, and the Bible. St Mark the Evangelist, the patron saint of Venice, has appeared in the upper right corner and is shown swooping down over the sea to rescue a Saracen (a term used in ancient and medieval times for various peoples from Sinai and the Middle East). St Mark lifts the Saracen from a sinking ship and places him in a lifeboat as a reward (we can assume) for his prayers and conversion to the Christian faith. The patron who commissioned the painting, Tommaso Rangone of the Scuola Grande di San Marcuola, is depicted towards the bottom of the painting with a white beard, wearing a golden robe. Very little is known about Tintoretto’s early career. His family’s name was actually
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Robusti, but he acquired the nickname Tintoretto – meaning ‘the little dyer’ – because his father was a fabric dyer. Tintoretto worked in Venice during the late Renaissance and probably began as an apprentice to Titian. Legend has it that he was dismissed after just ten days – perhaps because the older artist saw in him a dangerous competitor, or perhaps because they disagreed on painterly style and execution. Later, Tintoretto was included among the ranks of the great Venetian masters. The 17th-century painter and art biographer Scaramuccia anointed him as part of ‘the glorious triumvirate of Venice’ alongside Titian and Veronese. During Tintoretto’s own lifetime in Venice, though, his views made him something of an outsider, a Venetian rebel. Tintoretto is widely praised for his drawing skills. He had a motto on the wall of his studio: ‘The drawing of Michelangelo and the colour of Titian.’ He clearly admired those older artists but differed from them in his expression. Tintoretto remained largely faithful to Venice throughout his life, depicting many of the city’s religious and public buildings in his works. To assist him in rendering complex figures and poses in his paintings,
he used small wax figures in his studio. He would arrange the figures in a miniature scene and then modify the lighting to achieve the effect he wanted. Sometimes he would also hang figures by a string from above. The ‘flying’ evangelist St Mark appears in several of Tintoretto’s paintings. Although Tintoretto may have been regarded with some suspicion during his own lifetime, his reputation increased after his death. His works have gained even more admirers in more recent times, ranging from Jean-Paul Sartre to David Bowie.
A shipwreck that spawned legends Philip James de Loutherbourg The Battle of the First of June 1794 1795
This painting by the Frenchman, Philip James de Loutherbourg (1740–1812) tells several different stories about the battle known as the ‘Glorious First of June’, which took place off the coast of Brittany in 1794. In the centre, the British flagship HMS Queen Charlotte and the French flagship Montagne are engaged in a classic close-range duel with broadsides and cannon fire. It is the artist’s romanticised – and not entirely accurate – depiction of the first major fleet action of the French Revolutionary Wars. With ragged sails and broken masts, the British vessel is shown alongside the French ship, although they were never actually engaged in that position during the battle. The artistic liberties taken by the painter caused Lord Howe, who was in command of the British fleet at the battle, to complain, confidently saying that the French vessel would never have escaped from such a close engagement as that depicted in the painting. But it is perhaps the vessel sinking in the left foreground, away from the fierce duel at the centre of the painting, that has attracted the most interest over the years, spawning many legends. A French vessel, Vengeur du Peuple (meaning ‘Avenger of the People’), is sinking into the murky
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waters. The sea is full of people fighting for their lives. Some British lifeboats, already beyond capacity, are attempting to pull victims to safety. Other survivors cling desperately to pieces of wreckage. Vengeur du Peuple was one of six French warships lost in the battle. She was severely damaged under heavy fire from several British vessels. Her crew struggled valiantly with pumps and buckets to keep her afloat, but it was no use. Around 400 people vanished in the depths when she went down, but around the same number were rescued by two British ships. Among those saved was the French vessel’s captain, who was invited to dinner in the British officers’ mess just as Vengeur du Peuple finally sank. At home in France, the authorities chose to turn defeat into a tale of French courage. In French accounts of the battle, the crew refused to give up and kept battling alongside their captain right to the end. They sang the French anthem ‘La Marseillaise’, waved the tricolour flag and defiantly shouted, ‘Vive la Republique!’ before disappearing into the depths of the Atlantic. Even after the captain and crew returned to France following their release from imprisonment in England, the myth of the singing heroes who perished on duty
still persisted. In Jules Verne’s adventure novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), written more than a century after the battle, the submarine Nautilus discovers the wreck of Vengeur du Peuple at the bottom of the sea. Captain Nemo relates the romanticised tale of heroic sailors swallowed up by the waves. De Loutherbourg was a versatile artist who conducted a successful career in the worlds of theatre, popular entertainment and fine art. This may explain his bias towards dramatic effect rather than historical fact. By the time of his death in 1812 he had painted numerous contemporary battle subjects involving the British navy. This painting was acquired in the early 1800s by George, Prince of Wales, the future King George IV. Today, it is in the collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
The captain and his daughters George Morland The ‘Halsewell’ East Indiaman 1786
The sinking of the East Indiaman Halsewell on 6 January 1786 shocked all of Britain. It was one of the most famous shipwrecks of its time. Like the sinking of the Titanic more than a century later, the story of the Halsewell imprinted itself in the nation’s consciousness. The Halsewell had set sail from London bound for Madras (now Chennai) with around 240 people on board. She ran into difficulty on the second day of the voyage. For four days and nights she was caught up in a ferocious gale, and eventually she developed a leak. Finally, she was dashed against the rocks near Seacombe on the Dorset coast of southern England in the middle of the night. The wreck claimed many lives. Only 74 people survived. They managed to reach land and sought shelter in a small cavern, where they huddled together on the floor as the gales and crashing waves gave little hope of survival. The following morning, they were able to attract the attention of workers at a nearby quarry. Ropes were extended to the cavern, and some of the shipwreck victims managed to climb to safety. However, many were too weakened to hoist themselves up and fell to their certain death. Most stories told about the sinking
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focused on the fate of the ship’s captain Richard Pierce and his two teenage daughters, Eliza and Mary Ann. The figures on the right of the painting are said to represent them. Captain Pierce refused to avail himself of any rescue unless his daughters’ safety could be assured. When that was not possible, he remained on board. The Halsewell broke up and sank within a few hours. No one who remained on board survived. George Morland (1763–1804) was an English painter who focused on rustic scenes: farms and hunting; smugglers and gypsies; and landscapes informed by 17th-century Dutch painting. Much of Morland’s work was intended for reproduction in prints, from which his publishers made a good deal more money than he did. Morland was a heavy drinker with an extravagant lifestyle. He was dogged by debt and constantly on the run, trying to avoid bailiffs and prison. His early successes were soon eclipsed by his excesses, and both his painting and his health suffered as a result. Worn out and destitute, he died of meningitis at just 41 years of age.
TRANSFORMATION 1800–1900
From 1800, shipwreck scenes had become not only commonplace but formed a major subgenre of Western art. At the same time, the period saw a significant expansion in the variety of situations and subjects in storm scenes, increasingly depicted, not just by landscape and marine painters, but by artists better known for portraiture, history painting and other figurative genres. This development was not restricted to the high art of painting but extended into the world of theatre, where spectacles on the theme of ‘storm and shipwreck’ traded specifically on pleasurable awe and terror.
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The fascination of doom Joseph Mallord William Turner The Wreck of a Transport Ship ca. 1810
This is widely regarded as J.M.W. Turner’s most dramatic painting on this theme. With a masterful clarity, he portrays the sea’s overwhelming force and the chaos wrought by a shipwreck for the people on board. People are shown fighting for their lives. They reach out for something to grab hold of, some way to stay above the surface: an oar, another person’s arm or a piece of the vessel that has broken loose. Some people still cling to the ship’s rail high in the air, as the vessel is about to capsize. Below them is an abyss. Turner had produced preliminary sketches for this work back in 1805. His original subject was a nameless, anonymous merchant ship. When it was exhibited at the Royal Society of Arts, after Turner’s death in 1851, it was given the title The Wreck of Minotaur, Seventy-four, on the Haak Sands, 22nd December 1810. The sinking of HMS Minotaur was the subject of much speculation and debate, and the choice of title was probably a way of taking advantage of the immense public interest that still existed for that disaster. Turner himself never confirmed the inspiration for the painting. Minotaur, a Royal Navy vessel, had gone off course in the North Sea during a winter gale. After running aground on the
Haak sandbank near the Friesian islands off the Dutch and German coast, she listed and started letting in water. Sailors cut off her masts in an attempt to refloat her, but they were too late. On the morning of 23 December 1810 she had sunk further into the sand, and her entire bow was waterlogged. The waves continued to crash across the vessel, and she soon broke up. The crew made several attempts to escape to safety, and more than 100 succeeded. Even so, the wreck was one of the worst disasters off the Dutch coast in history, with perhaps as many as 500 lives lost. A century after this painting was completed, the British artist William Lionel Wyllie (1851-1931) expressed his praise many years later: ‘… the most splendid sea piece that has ever been painted; the power of the waves and the littleness of man have never been so magnificently suggested … the whole scene is one of death and horror.’ Turner displayed an incredible ability to convey the sense of a ship about to go down as a wreck. Turner’s painting is a reminder of the violent, brutal reality that preceded the loss of a ship at sea.
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Seafarers’ superstitions William Lionel Wyllie Davy Jones’s Locker 1890
A rusty anchor, swaying seaweed, a school of fish and – lurking in the background – a shipwreck. An evocative, and in British art unique, underwater scene. William Lionel Wyllie (1851–1931), a British marine artist, found the inspiration for this painting while on holiday in the summer of 1889 around the Firth of Clyde in western Scotland. He fashioned a makeshift diving helmet out of a biscuit tin and wore it to explore the area’s marine flora and fauna. This painting is not a faithful depiction of the underwater world he saw; rather, it portrays the realm of the dreaded Davy Jones, according to sailors’ superstition. In this context, the ‘locker’ refers to the type of wooden chest in which sailors kept their personal possessions. This setting is a metaphor for the bottom of the sea – the final resting place for thousands of drowned sailors – which has been current for centuries. According to legend, Davy Jones is the sailors’ devil who appears in different guises as a reminder of what awaits them in the event of a shipwreck. The 18th-century Scottish poet and author Tobias Smollet portrayed this demon in his novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751): ‘This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of
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sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep, and is seen in various shapes, perching among the rigging on the eve of hurricanes, shipwrecks, and other disasters, to which a seafaring life is exposed; warning the devoted wretch of death and woe.’ The origin of the legend of Davy Jones is unclear. Some have suggested that Jones was captain of the Flying Dutchman, a mythical ghost ship condemned to travel the seven seas for all eternity. Others say that the story is based on tales of the infamous 17th-century pirate captain David Jones, who sailed the Indian Ocean. A third candidate is a London pub landlord called Davy Jones who was said to get his customers blind drunk and sell them to slave traders. The legend has also appeared in popular culture. One of the earliest known references is in Daniel Defoe’s The Four Years Voyages of Capt. George Roberts, from 1726. More recently, Davy Jones turned up as a character in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, the supernatural ruler of the Seven Seas. William Lionel Wyllie’s painting Davy Jones’s Locker was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1890. In its review, The Times wrote: ‘Mr Wyllie has for once
left the surface of the sea in his fantastic picture called “Davy Jones’s Locker” – a picture which he has boldly and literally gone to the bottom to paint … What will the modern learner not do in the pursuit of truth? Mr Wyllie has been for a Challenger expedition on his own account, and none can say that he has not found his reward in the strange assemblage of forms and colours represented in his most original picture.’
Making the invisible visible Kehinde Wiley In search of the Miraculous (Jasmine Gracout and Robenson St Firmin) 2021
For centuries, artists have depicted shipwrecks – that is, vessels lost while en route to discover, colonise, fight, or transport cargo or passengers. Large European ships that went down in storms or bombarded by gunfire, spectacular shipwrecks, caused by the brutal forces of nature, accented with generic images of foreign coasts and heroic seafarers. These motifs have dominated the art of maritime disaster for 500 years. The African-American artist Kehinde Wiley (born 1977) takes a different approach. He reminds us that this artistic genre is anchored in European narratives, sharply delineated in time and space. The scenes depicted in these paintings are not simply universal, eternal truths. When Wiley takes on this subject matter, he acknowledges that he is taking on the giants of Western maritime painting: Ludolf Bakhuizen, Théodore Géricault, Joseph Mallord William Turner and Winslow Homer. But Wiley brings new perspectives to this celebrated tradition. Struggles at sea have not ceased just because paintings of shipwrecks fell out of fashion. They remain present in many people’s lives. Wiley makes use of familiar motifs –
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the sea, sky, coastline and boats – but he replaces the usual faces from 18th and 19th-century dramatic maritime art with marginalised people from our own time. They are not the typical heroes we are accustomed to seeing in paintings. They are often disempowered, desperate people forced to risk their lives at sea to save themselves and their loved ones. Instead of sturdy rain gear or smart uniforms, they wear contemporary jeans and shorts. Instead of vast ships, they struggle against the waves in small, rickety boats in search of a better life. Wiley is known for his naturalistic paintings of people of colour. Initially these portraits were of people he met in the United States. Subsequently, Wiley has extended his practice to include people from across the Global South. By employing the same techniques and conventions used by European old masters but replacing the habitual subjects with figures not usually seen in fine art, Wiley reminds us of alternative narratives – and he shines a light on the many gaps, absences and silences in Western art history. In his contemporary maritime painting, Wiley examines difficult modernday issues surrounding forced migration,
displacement and social exclusion. He thereby situates himself in the art world’s admirable tradition of questioning prevailing viewpoints and presenting images other than conventional ones, thus disturbing the viewer’s complacent, perhaps restricted, view of the world.
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