Théodore Gudin, "Le Mont-Saint-Michel sous l'orage", 1830. A perfect representative of Romanticism in painting, Gudin after training at the Royal Naval College in Angouleme, he embarked for New York and joined the American Navy on the Manchester-Packet. He sailed for three years. Then, back in Paris, nourished by strong images from his years at sea, he became a painter favouring scenes of shipwrecks, storms, beaches, fog...
Phew! "L'Évasion de Rochefort" by Édouard Manet painted in December 1880 for the 1881 Salon.
The work depicts the escape of Henri Rochefort - an anti-imperial polemicist - from the penal colony of New Caledonia in 1874.
It is wonderful that Manet prefers to depict the expanse of the sea and places the tiny boat in the centre of this immensity, the occupants can hardly be distinguished. The treatment of the waves is sublime, the transparency of the colours in green and blue, an extraordinary vibration. The term "impressionism" takes on its full meaning here!
"Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer ! La mer est ton miroir ; tu contemples ton âme Dans le déroulement infini de sa lame, Et ton esprit n’est pas un gouffre moins amer.
Tu te plais à plonger au sein de ton image ; Tu l’embrasses des yeux et des bras, et ton cœur Se distrait quelquefois de sa propre rumeur Au bruit de cette plainte indomptable et sauvage…"
Translation: "Free man, you will always cherish the sea! The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul In the infinite unfolding of its blade, And your mind is not a less bitter pit.
You like to plunge into the bosom of your image; You kiss it with your eyes and arms, and your heart Is sometimes distracted from its own rumour At the sound of this wild and untamed complaint..."
Charles Baudelaire
Pierre Prins, "Brume et soleil sur la Manche", 1882.
"Le Mer" aquarelle vers 1930 de Emil Nolde.
"Chaque soir, espérant des lendemains épiques,
L’azur phosphorescent de la mer des Tropiques
.
Enchantait leur sommeil d’un mirage doré ;
Ou penchés à l’avant des blanches caravelles,
Ils regardaient monter en un ciel ignoré
Du fond de l’Océan des étoiles nouvelles."
Translation : "Every night, hoping for epic tomorrows, The phosphorescent azure of the Tropical Sea
Enchanted their sleep with a golden mirage ; Or bent over the bow of white caravels,
They watched as the unknown sky rose From the bottom of the ocean new stars."
Poem by José-Maria de Heredia, "Les conquérants" (The conquerors), 1893 on a watercolour by Emil Nolde, ca. 1938.
"C’était sur des surfaces unies et planes comme celles de la mer que, par un matin d’orage déjà tout empourpré, commençait, au milieu d’un aigre silence, dans un vide infini, l’oeuvre nouvelle, et c’est dans un rose d’aurore que, pour se construire progressivement devant moi, cet univers inconnu était tiré du silence et de la nuit."
Translation : "It was on plain and flat surfaces like those of the sea that, on a stormy morning already all empurpled, the new work began, in the middle of a bitter silence, in an infinite emptiness, and it was in a rose of dawn that, in order to build itself progressively before me, this unknown universe was drawn out of the silence and the night."
"Mer avec nuages et trois bateaux" 1946 watercolour by Emil Nolde and excerpt from "La Prisonnière" by Marcel Proust, in "A la Recherche du temps perdu", 1913.
Dive into the blue waters of Henri Matisse with "Polynésie, la mer", 1946.
Marc Chagall, "Le passage de la mer Rouge", 1965.
The sea must be beautiful to see its happiness!
Joan Miró, "Aïeule devant la mer".
Let us enjoy the first days at the seaside, as in 1916.
