Series - The Sea in art
Théodore Gudin, “Mont-Saint-Michel under the storm”, 1830.
A perfect representative of romanticism in painting, Gudin after training at the Royal Naval College in Angoulème, he embarked for New York and enlisted in the American navy, on the Manchester-Packet. He sailed for three years. Then, back in Paris, nourished by strong images from his years at sea, he became a painter favoring scenes of shipwrecks, storms, beaches, fog...
"The Escape from Rochefort" by Édouard Manet painted in December 1880 for the Salon of 1881. The work represents the escape in 1874 of Henri Rochefort - anti-imperial polemicist - from the penal colony of New Caledonia. It's wonderful that Manet favors representing the expanse of the sea and places the tiny boat in the center of this immensity, we can barely distinguish the occupants. The treatment of the waves is sublime, the transparency of the colors in green and blue, an extraordinary vibration. The term “impressionism” takes on its full meaning here!
"Free man, always you will cherish the sea !
The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul
In the infinite unfolding of his blade,
And your mind is no less bitter abyss.
You like to dive into your image;
You embrace him with your eyes and your arms, and your heart
Sometimes gets distracted by his own rumor
At the sound of this indomitable and wild complaint..."
Charles Baudelaire
Pierre Prins, “Mist and sun on the Channel”, 1882.
"The Sea" watercolor around 1930 by Emil Nolde.
"Every night, hoping for an epic tomorrow,
The phosphorescent azure of the tropical sea.
Enchanted their sleep with a golden mirage;
Or leaning at the front of white caravels.
They watched rise in an unknown sky
From the bottom of the Ocean new stars...
Poem by José-Maria de Heredia, "The Conquerors", 1893 on a watercolor by Emil Nolde, circa 1938.
"It was on smooth and flat surfaces like those of the sea that, on a stormy morning already all purple, the new work began, in the middle of a bitter silence, in an infinite void, and it is in a dawn pink that, to gradually build itself before me, this unknown universe was drawn from silence and night."
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“Sea with clouds and three boats” watercolor 1946 by Emil Nolde and extract from “La Prisonnière” by Marcel Proust, in “In Search of Lost Time”, 1913.
Let's dive into the blue waters of Henri Matisse with "Polynésie, la mer", 1946.
Marc Chagall, “The Passage of the Red Sea”, 1965.
Joan Miró, “Grandmother in front of the sea”.
Seaside, 1916.