The most famous shipwreck paintings include Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, J. M. W. Turner's The Shipwreck, Caspar David Friedrich's The Sea of Ice and Ivan Aivazovsky's The Ninth Wave.
Few of the painters who made them ever saw a ship go down. Most of these pictures are reconstructions, pieced together from survivors' words, a newspaper column or a poem, and at least once from a scale model of a raft built in a Paris studio.
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How These Were Chosen
A shipwreck holds in one picture the two things a sea painter can show: a force no one controls, and the people caught in it. With ships driven by the wind along badly charted coasts, a single storm could take a crew, a cargo and every passenger on board.
Once newspapers began to report such disasters, a wreck also became news, and a painter could count on a public that knew the story before it saw the picture.
The eighteenth century gave that public a word for what it felt. In 1757, the Irish-born philosopher Edmund Burke described the sublime, the thrill of terror felt from a place of safety. A storm at sea, seen from a drawing room, offered exactly that, and collectors ordered wrecks the way they ordered landscapes.
Whoever ordered the picture, the painter still had to pick a moment. A painter who chose the minutes before showed a ship still fighting, with rocks ahead that the viewer could see and the sailors could not. One who chose the moment the ship went under showed masts breaking and bodies going into the water, but faces were hard to read in the chaos.
Afterward, the sea calms and the story moves to the survivors: a raft, a lifeboat, a beach, a crew counting what it saved. Théodore Géricault chose a raft adrift, the Norwegian Johan Christian Dahl a beach, and Ivan Aivazovsky two broken spars.
A storm that a ship rides out makes a sea picture, not a shipwreck. A wreck needs a vessel lost, sunk, crushed or left adrift, and the painter can take it from anywhere. Eugène Delacroix took his from a poem by Lord Byron, the German painter Max Beckmann his from a Berlin daily, and Albert Bierstadt from a ship he was traveling on.
12. Albert Bierstadt, Wreck of the "Ancon" in Loring Bay, Alaska (1889)
Albert Bierstadt's Wreck of the "Ancon" in Loring Bay, Alaska, shows water so still that the wreck appears twice, once on the reef and once upside down beneath it. The ship is a paddle steamer, driven by a big wheel on each side, and she lies tilted on the rocks under a flat gray sky, her smokestack and masts leaning toward the shore.
Bierstadt had no need to invent a storm, because he had been on board. In 1889 the German-born American painter, famous for his giant views of the Rockies and Yosemite, was traveling in Alaska as a passenger on the Ancon, a wooden steamer.
At Loring, a cannery settlement in the southeast of Alaska, the ship spent the night at the wharf taking on cases of salmon. The accident came when she left the wharf, at 3 a.m. on August 28, as the tide was going out.
According to the passengers, the rope that held the back of the ship to the wharf was let go too early. The current pushed the Ancon sideways onto a reef a few hundred feet from shore.
As the water fell, she settled on the rocks and broke in two. Cabin doors jammed under the strain, and some passengers climbed out through their windows.
Nobody died. Small boats ferried everyone ashore, where the cannery company and the Tlingit, the Native people of that coast, gave them shelter. Bierstadt wrote to his wife that he had had "a narrow escape," and while he was stranded at Loring he filled two sketchbooks and made about sixty color studies.
His picture of the Ancon is one of those studies, a small oil on paper. It shows a wreck the way it really happened, without wind or waves, a ship lost in a sheltered harbor through one mistake with a rope.
At a Glance
Artist: Albert Bierstadt (1830 to 1902), German-born American
Painted: 1889
Medium: Oil on paper mounted on Masonite
Size: 35.9 × 50.2 cm (14.1 × 19.75 in)
Where to see it: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
About This Painting
Did Albert Bierstadt paint anything else on his 1889 Alaska trip?
Yes. Alaskan Coast Range, an oil sketch in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, was probably made on the spot during the same journey.
11. J. M. W. Turner, A Disaster at Sea (about 1835)
J. M. W. Turner's A Disaster at Sea is built from pink and red strokes, laid on fast and never worked up, which make up most of the bodies at the center of the canvas. Women and children cling to a broken mast in a white, churning sea.
Turner painted it around 1835, on a canvas more than two meters wide, and never showed it in public. Its title names no ship. The disaster most often linked to it is one in which help was there and was turned away.