ARTISTS: art has some limitations. It can ' t go the distance to complete abstraction-but, then, neither can portraiture. It is also true that some historic marine " art" that is embraced with open arms by the faithful would never pass muster as academic art and might not even qualify as good primitive art. Some of it is only illustration, and poor illustration at that. But this only serves to point up one of the charms of marine art: the subject is all important. It may be clothed in great technique and presented with a depth of feeling that combines to form a masterpiece, or it may barely have gotten from the pencil to the paper, but either way the marine subject strikes its chord with those who know the sea. The breadth of American marine art stretches from the abstract works of Lyonel Feininger and John Marin through impressionists such as Childe Hossarn and Mabel M. Woodward, luminists William S. Haseltine and Fitz Hugh Lane, realists like Thomas Birch and Robert Salmon to inspired primitives like the Bards and Jurgen Friedrich Huge, and on to old sailors like Ashley Bowen whose works are crude but have the ring of truth. There have been many artists whose work has been limited almost completely to marine works, such as A. T. Bricher, Antonio Jacobson and J . E. Buttersworth. But there are many, famous for their work in other fields, who have made exciting contributions to marine painting on the few occasions when they turned their ,,
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At top, The Embarkation o f Domine Bogardus from New Amsterdam August 17, 1647 attributed to Augustine Herrman. Herrman is one of the earliest recorders of American scenes. N ote the shape of the row boat and the small size of the waiting ships. Courtesy, Museum of the City of New York. The renowned American portraitist John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) showed a fin e hand f or the look and feel of the ships of his day in his dramatic painting of a harbor rescue, "Brook Watson and the Shark." Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Paul Revere is not thought of as a marine artist, but in this engraving of his of 1768, the vessels are meticulously drawn. Courtesy, the Ne w York Public Library.
SEA HISTORY, FALL 1979