How do you paint something that refuses to hold still? The painters on this list tried palette knives, thin layers of transparent paint and carved wooden blocks. One of them gave up on painting waves outdoors and worked from memory, convinced that no brush could catch the splash of a wave as it happened.
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How These Were Chosen
A seascape is a picture whose real subject is the sea. A sitter can hold a pose for an hour, but a wave keeps its shape for a second, and its color shifts with the sky it reflects and the depth beneath it.
Every picture here gives the sea the leading role. The people in it are out on the water, at its mercy, or too small on the shore to compete with it. Beach scenes where the sea is only a backdrop stayed off the list, and each painter appears once.
Seen one after another, the twelve answer the same practical question: how to make moving water look deep, heavy and wet with materials that hold still.
12. Vincent van Gogh, Seascape near Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (1888)
Inside the green curl of the wave closest to the beach, the word Vincent is painted in red and underlined. Vincent van Gogh had stopped signing his canvases by August 1888, because a signature seemed too silly to him, yet this seascape kept its name. The reason lies in what he went to find on that beach.
In 1888 he was living in Arles, in the south of France, and he traveled down to Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a fishing village on the Mediterranean, "just to see a blue sea and a blue sky." He painted standing on the sand, and grains of it are still caught in the paint layers.
The sea he found there would not stay blue. It had "a color like mackerel, in other words, changing," he wrote to Theo, his younger brother. One moment it looked green or purple, and a second later its reflections went pink or gray.
The canvas tries to hold that change. He laid in the open water in blue and white, then built the waves with green and yellow spread with a palette knife, a flexible steel blade made for mixing colors. In the green wave of the middle distance, yellow breaks into the crest all along the top, and the water never settles on one color.
The signature joins that play of colors. "On a seascape there's a very outrageous red signature," he explained, "because I wanted a red note in the green."
At a Glance
Artist: Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890)
Painted: 1888
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 50.5 × 64.3 cm (19.9 × 25.3 in)
Where to see it: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
11. Ludolf Bakhuizen, Ships in Distress off a Rocky Coast (1667)
Gray-green water heaves against a line of jagged rocks, and three Dutch cargo ships, each already missing a mast, fight to stay clear of them. Ludolf Bakhuizen painted this storm in Amsterdam in 1667, for buyers who knew such ships better than anyone. Yet rocks like these were almost nowhere to be found on the Dutch coast, and Bakhuizen put them in anyway.