This is the first major convention to survey the tradition of marine artwork that has been inextricably associated with Britain’s rise to prominence as a maritime and imperial energy, and place the genre in the middle of this burgeoning Uk art realm of the eighteenth century.
The need for marine paintings—and the prints made after them—in the eighteenth century, from ship releases to shipwrecks, naval battles to serene coastal views, reflects Britain’s absolute reliance upon the sea. In a day and time whenever Britain stated to rule the waves, marine paintings found an innovative new relevance and aided the area country tell its tales of victory and disaster.
Organized in thematic areas within a broadly chronological framework, Spreading Canvas covers the time between the arrival in Greenwich for the Dutch marine painters Willem van de Velde the Elder and young, in the early 1670s, and J. M. W. Turner’s first responses to your Battle of Trafalgar, exhibited at their gallery in 1806. Featuring works by designers such as Peter Monamy, Samuel Scott, Dominic Serres, and Nicholas Pocock, the convention contends that marine painters which created photos regarding the sea and shipping in eighteenth-century Britain were over simple stylistic inheritors of a Dutch seventeenth-century tradition; rather, they forged a uniquely Brit approach to their subject.
Drawn mainly through the collections regarding the Center, Spreading Canvas is augmented by dazzling financial loans through the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, alongside exclusive and institutional selections. This event includes ship models, prints, paintings, sketchbooks, and letters, in order to reconstruct the total selection of representational settings that have been deployed through the entire century to portray the maritime exploits of the country. These types of variety in addition reflects the truth that marine paintings, therefore the music artists who produced them, were fully embedded into the thriving and cosmopolitan artistic world of this period.