Ports and harbours, rivers and canals, were essential to the prosperity of European nations. Used for trade, fishing, transport and warfare, shipping and its infrastructure has long been a popular subject for artists and patrons.
Every country produced specialists in marine subjects: from the seventeenth century, when Claude’s great idealised port scenes contrast with Dutch artists’ more down-to-earth depictions of their own maritime lives; Vernet in eighteenth-century France, and the many view-painters of the period producing souvenirs for Grand Tourists; to the numerous nineteenth- and twentieth-century painters of busy naval harbours and picturesque fishing villages.
All remind us how historically important these subjects are, and how the combination of sea, landscape and sky with human activity can make successful paintings.
