“ If he aspires to conquer difficulties they are there in plenty, difficulties which have to be met with courage and handled with discretion. If he is content with simple tasks there are many which will occupy him agreeably and be well worth working out. If he is a serious student of nature’s manifestations they are set before him in profusion, and the whole array of her mysteries is paraded for his instruction; and if humanity is his subject, all the actors in the drama of sea life are there to inspire him with their doings and to stir his imagination with the record of their achievements. ”

“ It is difficult to paint a breaking wave, to preserve its architectural quality of design and its appearance of massive strength, and yet to show that it is a moving and momentary thing disappearing as quickly as it is formed. It is difficult to represent the confusion of a stormy sea, churned into foam and tossing in the wildest turmoil, and yet to make intelligible the order and regularity of its movement and the right sequence of its changing forms. ”

“ Even in pictures which represent the coast in its most peaceful moments, when the sea ripples lazily round the rocks under the light of the summer sun, the scars left by the assaults of waves driven by past storms cannot be concealed. Fragments torn from the cliffs strew the shore, the wreckage of the land is heaped up waiting for the inevitable moment when the sea, renewing its attack, will swallow up what it has already half destroyed. ”

“ What is particularly to be learned from Henry Moore’s pictures is the wide variety of matters which have to be studied by the men who aspire to paint the sea with a sufficient measure of artistic fitness. There are, of course, many ways of representing the sea pictorially—as a background or setting to some nautical incident; as an accessory in a scene which has humanity for its main interest; as a generalized scheme of colour or tone; as a decorative motive with conventionalized forms; or as a poetically indefinite fantasy in which nearly everything is left to the imagination of the beholder. ”

“ This is because the sea life is so abounding in action, and because the people who lead it are of so many types and so unstereotyped in their ways, that to the painter who works by the sea a constant succession of new motives is presented, and motives, too, which by their picturesqueness and human interest satisfy completely the artistic demand.
Clearly, in marine painting there is no lack of opportunities. In its various branches it offers to the artist room for the most divergent activities and it allows him a spacious field for the exercise of his powers. ”

“ The new school of landscape was deficient neither in enthusiasm nor energy. Men of marked originality and brilliant capacity rallied to it in large numbers, and with the vigorous initiative of pioneers in a land of promise set to work to make their discoveries effective. They wrested nature’s secrets from her one by one, secrets of colour, secrets of illumination and light and shade, secrets and mysteries of ever-changing atmospheric effect. ”

“ There is no place in marine painting for the man who, taking the line of least resistance, seeks by compromise and convention to gloss over his want of knowledge and tries by superficial cleverness of handling to divert attention from the incompleteness of his analysis. An artist of this sort had better let the sea alone and choose something simpler and less abounding with pitfalls for his inexperience. ”

“ This combination of instantaneous apprehension and unhesitating expression is, indeed, a necessity for the artist who wishes to avoid a merely conventional rendering of the sea and who is anxious to suggest properly its really infinite variety. There is so much that must be done quickly, there are such incessant changes of effect and condition, that the deliberate worker, thinking slowly and using his appliances unreadily, is always in danger of being left with his intention unrealized. He sees something that appeals to him as a good subject and he begins to study it in all seriousness ”

“ It is not given to many people, artists or laymen, to feel the profound mystery and the dramatic grandeur of the open sea; there are plenty, however, who can sense the appeal of the broken and battered coast and find romance in the harbours and tidal inlets. ”

“ The story which such a picture has to tell is full of significance because the facts presented by the artist sum up a series of human activities and throw light upon the conditions under which these activities have been carried on. It is a story, too, with an appeal because it shows a phase of human endurance which deserves sympathy and respect, sympathy for the difficulties encountered, and respect for the way in which they have been overcome; and it has its full measure of picturesqueness and artistic fitness by which its claim to serious treatment is amply justified. ”

“ It is the surrounding sea that encourages the rich growth of our vegetation, and that gives to our landscape its wealth of detail and its ample variety of colour. As the sea influences the manner of our national life, so it influences the quality, the sentiment, and the method of our art, helping us to build up a school which is insular in its merit and its expression, and national in its feeling and its intention. ”

“ The first suggests the turmoil of a gathering storm, threatening ruin and destruction to everything in its path and sweeping irresistibly over land and sea. In his treatment of it the artist has made the most of a dramatic opportunity to show how thorough has been his study of nature and how well he understands her ways, even when she is in one of her most perverse moods. ”

“ Henry Moore as an imitator of Turner, following in the wake of a leader whom he could never overtake, would have been a wasted force in art. Henry Moore as a painter true to his own convictions, striving earnestly to set before us his extraordinarily intimate view of the sea, has established a standard against which the achievements of our modern sea painters can be measured most instructively, and has pointed out the principles on which these painters must work if they are to justify their effort. Knowledge such as Turner possessed is by its very vastness incomprehensible to the ordinary man ”

“ There is, indeed, hardly any kind of sentiment that does not, in this connexion, lend itself well to the artist’s purpose: tragedy, domestic drama, romance, pure fantasy, comedy even, are all permissible, and often a picture with the most attractive qualities can be made out of a plain statement of everyday facts, so picturesque is the setting which the sea life provides for the people who lead it. ”

“ Even a piece of imaginative fantasy is none the worse for being based judiciously on solid fact.
Beside the purely marine painting, the picture that is concerned solely with the sea and ships that sail on it, there is a place for the coast subject. It is true that the coast scene is, more often than not, only a landscape into which the sea is introduced as a subsidiary interest, but under this heading can be included also those views of harbours, estuaries, cliffs, and beaches, which many painters have treated with distinction of style and charm of sentiment. ”

“ Therefore we regard it naturally as a friendly influence in the lives of us all. But we owe it a debt of gratitude also for the effect it has had upon our British art. It is from our insular climate, from the mists and moisture which the sea brings, that those atmospheric qualities come which make the study of nature in the British Isles such a never-ending delight. ”

“ For instance, the painter properly equipped would make the right distinction, both in colour and wave form, between the deep sea and that in shallow places; between the transparency of waves breaking on a rocky coast and those on a sandy beach; between the wave action in a tidal current moving with or against the wind; or between the seas that are penned in a narrow channel and those that are running free in wide spaces. These are elementary matters, perhaps, in the study of marine painting, but elementary or not they are only too often misapprehended by the careless observer ”

“ To paint the abstract drama of the sea in the only way that can be made convincing, the possession of a temperament is absolutely essential, but this temperament must be schooled and disciplined by lifelong study or the drama will degenerate into incredible fantasy. Turner was temperamentally fitted to attempt the highest flights, and with his perfect technical equipment nothing was beyond his reach. Other artists must be content to admire his poetic power without aspiring to rival it. ”

“ One mistake very often made by men who have not carried their studies far enough is to miss the necessary connexion between the state of the sea and the accompanying condition of the atmosphere; another is to paint in a sea picture a sky that is in wrong relation to the wave movement. Both these errors arise from the failure of the painter to study his subject as a whole, from his inexperience of what may be called the technical peculiarities of his material. ”

“ Every successful sea picture is a difficulty overcome and a problem solved, and every successful sea painter is a man who has struggled earnestly with intractable material and has built his achievement on a foundation of laboriously acquired knowledge. Probably that is why there have been comparatively few great sea painters; it is certainly a reason why the few who can be accounted great should be regarded as masters of the highest rank with places of distinction in the history of art. ”

“ Possibly, being a conscientious person, he decides to paint one aspect only of the sea and to specialize in one type of subject which he can master by long and laborious practice; or, being less particular, he builds up a pretty convention which will help him to turn out superficially attractive things that will please a none too critical public. But in neither way is the great sea painter made, the painter who can tell the story of the sea and convey to us its sentiment and its character. ”

“ The Needles, with its sense of breeziness and of the rough-and-tumble of a tide-race, is a picture that excites a distinctly pleasurable emotion, so much is there in it of the joy of living when the sun shines brightly and the wind blows briskly and the sea is sparkling and full of colour. ”

“ Responsive themselves to the charm of their surroundings, they have catered for a public which appreciates the beauties of nature and likes to see them realized pictorially; lovers themselves of the land in which they live, they have striven to please the many people who are possessed by a similar sentiment and wish to have about them pictures in which this sentiment is agreeably reflected. No record of British scenery could be complete, and no appeal to British sentiment could be effective, if our artists ignored the wide variety of subjects which the sea offers them. ”

“ Details which to the unprofessional eye seem of no significance must be carefully attended to because each one of them contributes something to the sum total of fact and helps to make the character intelligible, and to slur over these details is a fatal mistake. A ship treated conventionally and without personal insight is as uninspiring pictorially as a portrait which has missed all the little human characteristics which made the sitter interesting.
The painter of shipping has, too, a very wide field to cover. ”

“ The painter must perceive that this problem has many sides, and that each one must receive exactly its right amount of consideration if the pictorial solution is to be correct; if he has to make a compromise with reality the most subtle judgment will be required of him to create an illusion that will look like truth.
To multiply such examples would be easy, for there is no phase of sea painting in which difficulties do not abound. ”

“ In the first picture, indeed, the chance of working out a very agreeable line composition has been used by the artist with the best of judgment, and he has entered thoroughly into the spirit of his subject. In the Landing Fish, a good illustration is given of the way in which a perfectly literal statement of a scene, for which almost any fishing-port would provide a setting, can be made artistically important by a painter who looks at it sympathetically and who can induce other people to look at it through his eyes. ”

“ Frankly, the intention of both painters was to put in everything that the most acute vision could detect in the scene represented and to attain completeness by painstaking effort; and undeniably both painters have justified themselves by the thoroughness with which they have carried out this intention. Yet to many people so much labour to prove the sincerity of the artist would seem to be unnecessary and to savour somewhat of pedantry; knowledge so lavishly displayed—and with such scrupulous regard for accuracy—is not always persuasive. ”

“ Always the contact with the sea brings him something fresh that leads him into new trains of thought and suggests to him new ways of applying his technical skill; but always the demand is made upon him that he should put forth the whole of his effort to reach and maintain the highest standard of artistic practice. ”

“ His picture is entirely credible: he makes us believe that he has put before us what actually happened, and he treats the whole motive with a seamanlike understanding that clears it of all suspicion of artificiality. Compositions of this type were popular a century ago, when the sea painters had opportunities to witness such picturesque, yard-arm to yard-arm naval actions; the sea-fights of to-day do not lend themselves so well to the artist’s purposes. A good deal of the drama must inevitably be lost when miles of water intervene between the opposing fleets. ”

“ The habitual landscape painter, accustomed to fixed forms and effects that followed more or less regular rules, might easily have drifted into a conventional representation of the sea if he had not been shown the way to look at it by the men who knew it intimately, and if works by these men had not existed to provide him with the means of testing his own achievement. ”

“ The Regatta Day, as its subject befits, is a lively and brightly treated study, full of incident, and attractively irresponsible in composition. It has both power and originality, and it puts beyond question his capabilities as a draughtsman because it presents a difficult problem in perspective which he has solved most happily. But much of its charm comes from the holiday spirit in which it is conceived and carried out. ”