11 Classic Works of Art, Marine Paintings - With Footnotes, #28

Pierre Bonnard , French, 1867 - 1947
The Port Of Cannes, Le Port de Cannes, c. 1926 - 1927
Oil, canvas
Private Collection

Cannes is a city located on the French Riviera. It is a commune of France located in the Alpes-Maritimes department, and host city of the annual Cannes Film Festival, Midem, and Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. .

Pierre Bonnard , French, 1867 - 1947
The Port Of Cannes, Le Port de Cannes, c. 1920
Oil, canvas
Private Collection

In the 10th century, the town was known as Canua. The name may derive from "canna," a reed. Canua was probably the site of a small Ligurian port, and later a Roman outpost on Le Suquet hill, suggested by Roman tombs discovered here. Le Suquet housed an 11th-century tower which overlooked swamps where the city now stands. Most of the ancient activity, especially protection, was on the Lérins Islands and the history of Cannes is closely tied to the history of the islands.

An attack by the Saracens in 891, who remained until the end of the 10th century, devastated the country around Canua. The insecurity of the Lérins islands forced the monks to settle on the mainland, at the Suquet. Construction of a castle in 1035 fortified the city by then known as Cannes, and at the end of the 11th century construction was started on two towers on the Lérins islands. One took a century to build.

Around 1530, Cannes detached from the monks who had controlled the city for hundreds of years and became independent.

During the 18th century, both the Spanish and British tried to gain control of the Lérins Islands but were chased away by the French. The islands were later controlled by many, such as Jean-Honoré Alziary, and the Bishop of Fréjus. They had many different purposes: at the end of the 19th century, one served as hospital for soldiers wounded in the Crimean War. More on Cannes

Pierre Bonnard, French, 1867 - 1947
The Port of Cannes, 1927
Oil on canvas
41 x 65 cm
National Gallery of Canada

Pierre Bonnard (3 October 1867 — 23 January 1947) was a French painter and printmaker, as well as a founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis. Bonnard preferred to work from memory, using drawings as a reference, and his paintings are often characterized by a dreamlike quality. The intimate domestic scenes, for which he is perhaps best known, often include his wife Marthe de Meligny.

Bonnard has been described as "the most thoroughly idiosyncratic of all the great twentieth- century painters", and the unusual vantage points of his compositions rely less on traditional modes of pictorial structure than voluptuous color, poetic allusions and visual wit. Identified as a late practitioner of Impressionism in the early 20th century, Bonnard has since been recognized for his unique use of color and his complex imagery. More


Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida - 1899
The Net, c. 1899
Oil on canvas
Height: 50 cm (19.69 in.), Width: 69 cm (27.17 in.)
Private collection

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (27 February 1863 10 August 1923) was a Spanish painter. Sorolla excelled in the painting of portraits, landscapes, and monumental works of social and historical themes. His most typical works are characterized by a dexterous representation of the people and landscape under the sunlight of his native land. More

Charles Dixon, 1872 -1934
The Battle of Trafalgar, c. 1903
Watercolour and bodycolour
88.9 x 180.3cm (35 x 71in)
Private collection

The Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) was a naval engagement fought by the British Royal Navy against the combined fleets of the French and Spanish Navies, during the War of the Third Coalition (August–December 1805) of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815).

Twenty-seven British ships of the line led by Admiral Lord Nelson aboard HMS Victory defeated thirty-three French and Spanish ships of the line under the French Admiral Villeneuve in the Atlantic off the southwest coast of Spain, just west of Cape Trafalgar, in Caños de Meca. The Franco-Spanish fleet lost twenty-two ships, without a single British vessel being lost. It was the most decisive naval battle of the war, conclusively ending French plans to invade England.

The British victory spectacularly confirmed the naval supremacy that Britain had established during the eighteenth century and was achieved in part through Nelson's departure from the prevailing naval tactical orthodoxy. 

Nelson was shot by a French musketeer during the battle and died shortly after, becoming one of Britain's greatest war heroes. Villeneuve was captured along with his ship Bucentaure. Admiral Federico Gravina, the senior Spanish flag officer, escaped with the remnant of the fleet and succumbed months later to wounds sustained during the battle. Villeneuve attended Nelson's funeral while a captive on parole in Britain. The Battle of Trafalgar

Charles Edward Dixon (8 December 1872 - 12 September 1934) was a British maritime painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose work was highly successful and regularly exhibited at the Royal Academy. Several of his paintings are held by the National Maritime Museum and he was a regular contributing artist to magazines and periodicals. He lived at Itchenor in Sussex and died in 1934. More

William Lee Hankey, (1869–1952) RWS,RI,ROI,RE,NS
CANNES, PORT ET SUQUET
Oil on canvas
61.5 x 74cm
Private collection


Le Suquet, sometimes called Mont-Chevalier, is the oldest district of Cannes , its "old town", situated on a hill west of the bay , Old Port. Lord Brougham played his part to speed up the creation of a port at the foot of the Suquet . For a hundred years, the fishermen demanded a dike to protect themselves from the labech, the south-west wind which can trigger fierce storms. Bewitched by the site, the benefactor intervened with King Louis-Philippe. The grateful city erected a statue in 1898 to this providential man.

But it was another Englishman, the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, the eldest son of Queen Victoria and future Edward VII, who laid the first stone of the pier which bears his name in 1898. Before being crowned, the Prince of Wales had made Cannes his headquarters, More Suquet


William Lee Hankey (1869–1952) RWS,RI,ROI,RE,NS was a British painter and book illustrator. He specialised in landscapes, character studies and portraits of pastoral life, particularly in studies of mothers with young children.

He was born in Chester and worked as a designer after leaving school. He studied art in the evenings at the Chester School of Art, then at the Royal College of Art. Later in Paris he became influenced by the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage, who also favoured rustic scenes depicted in a realistic but sentimental style. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1896 and was President of the London Sketch Club from 1902 to 1904. He stayed in France in the early 1900s, painting many of his works in Brittany and Normandy. From 1904 until well after World War I he maintained a studio at the Etaples art colony.

It was Hankey's black and white and coloured etchings of the people of Étaples, which gained him a reputation as 'one of the most gifted of the figurative printmakers working in original drypoint during the first thirty years of the 20th century'. One that is particularly striking for its stylistic presentation was "The Refugees", his contribution to raising awareness of the consequences for ordinary people of the German invasion of France and Belgium in 1914. He went on to serve with the Artists' Rifles from 1915 to 1918.

In Britain he had been associated with the Newlyn School, a group of English artists based in the titular village in Cornwall who were themselves influenced by the romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Keats. More

Edward William Cooke, 1811 – 1880
French Sloop entering the harbour of Tréport, c. 1869
Oil on canvas
81.3 x 134.6cm (32 x 53in)
Private collection


Le Treport is a coastal port town on the English Channel in northern Seine-Maritime, normandy, and just a few kilometres from Eu and Mers-les-Bains, which falls on the Picardy side of the River Bresle.

A long standing port town, Le Tréport was established as a seaside resort in the 19th century, it was with the arrival of 'paid holidays for all workers' in France in 1936 that the town really started to grow in popularity - it is one of the most accessible seaside resorts from Paris. More Le Treport


Edward William Cooke, R.A., F.R.S., F.Z.S., F.S.A., F.G.S. (27 March 1811 – 4 January 1880) was an English landscape and marine painter, and gardener. Cooke was born in Pentonville, London. He was raised in the company of artists. He was a precocious draughtsman and a skilled engraver from an early age, displayed an equal preference for marine subjects and published his "Shipping and Craft" a series of accomplished engravings when he was 18, in 1829. Cooke began painting in oils in 1833, and first exhibited at the Royal Academy and British Institution in 1835, by which time his style was essentially formed.

He went on to travel and paint with great industry at home and abroad, indulging his love of the 17th-century Dutch marine artists with a visit to the Netherlands in 1837. He returned regularly over the next 23 years, studying the effects of the coastal landscape and light, as well as the works of the country's Old Masters, resulting in highly successful paintings. He went on to travel in Scandinavia, Spain, North Africa and, above all, to Venice. In 1858, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary Academician. . More Edward William Cooke

George William Joy, 1844 - 1925
Ships moored in calm waters
Watercolour
17.8 x 26cm (7 x 10 1/4in)
Private collection

George William Joy (July 7, 1844 in Dublin, Ireland – October 28, 1925 in Purbrook, Hampshire) was an Irish painter in London.  He was initially destined for the military and was also an accomplished violin player. After a foot injury at a young age, his father declared him unfit for military service. Joy was then educated at Harrow School and eventually pursued a career as an artist. He studied in London's South Kensington School of Art and later at the Royal Academy.

In 1868 Joy went to Paris where for two years he was a student of Charles-François Jalabert and Léon Bonnat. There he met masters like Gérôme, Cabanel, Jules Breton, Jules Lefebvre und Philippe Rousseau.

Going back to London, Joy established himself as a history and genre painter, and became a frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy, the Salon des artistes français and the Royal Hibernian Academy. He became a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 1895.

To satisfy his early military ambitions, Joy entered the Artists Rifles where he was known as a good shot, representing Ireland several times. He spent many winters in Swanage from 1896 and eventually retired to Purbrook. Both of his sons were killed in 1915 during World War I. More George William Joy

Jan Marti, (1958-) 
Automne sur Honfleur 
Oil on canvas 
50 x 61 cm 
Private collection

Honfleur is a commune in northwestern France. It is located on the southern bank of the estuary of the Seine across from le Havre and very close to the exit of the Pont de Normandie. Its inhabitants are called Honfleurais.

It is especially known for its old, beautiful picturesque port, characterized by its houses with slate-covered frontages, painted many times by artists, including in particular Gustave Courbet, Eugène Boudin, Claude Monet and Johan Jongkind, forming the école de Honfleur (Honfleur school) which contributed to the appearance of the Impressionist movement. More Honfleur

Jan Marti was born in 1958 in Savoy, after a few attempts at studying and various jobs that he quickly gives up, he then devotes himself to painting. He channels his connection to the abstract in hectic and elegant strokes. 

The exuberant blaze of colours and elements flatters both sensibility and eyes. His work depicts a naturally suggested beauty. Jan Marti's works are part of numerous exhibitions and private collections in France and abroad. More Jan Marti

Chiharu Shiota
The key in the hand at Japanese Pavillon, 2015 

Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese installation artist born in 1972 in Osaka. She has been living and working in Berlin since 1996.

Shiota studied at the Seika University in Kyoto and at various schools in Germany. Shiota's oeuvre links various aspects of art performances and installation practices. Mostly renown for her vast, room-spanning webs of threads or hoses, she links abstract networks with concrete everyday objects such as keys, windows, dresses, shoes, boats and suitcases. Besides installation works, she frequently collaborates with choreographers and composers. More Chiharu Shiota

JOHN SLOAN, (1871–1951)  
The Wake of the Ferry II, 1907
Oil on canvas
26 x 32 in.
Phillips Collection

John French Sloan began painting The Wake of the Ferry II in 1907, his second version of this scene. The subject may well have been suggested by Sloan’s ferry trips with his wife from Jersey City to Philadelphia for medical treatments.

The stylistic influence of Robert Henri, so pervasive in Sloan's early work, is apparent here; the scene has been broadly conceived, spontaneously conveyed, and boldly brushed, in a limited palette of grays and near-blacks. The composition reinforces the mood; the ferry's tilted angle, framing a view of the rough waters, is arresting, and the diagonal of the wake receding into the mist reinforces the sense of loneliness and distance. In this setting, the small figure on the right, understated and half lost in shadow, becomes the essential actor in this version of Sloan's human comedy and brings into focus its melancholy expression.

In 1971 The Wake of the Ferry II was selected by the United States Postal Service for a stamp commemorating the centennial year of Sloan's birth. More The Wake of the Ferry

John French Sloan (August 2, 1871 – September 7, 1951) was a twentieth-century painter and etcher and one of the founders of the Ashcan school of American art. He was also a member of the group known as The Eight. He is best known for his urban genre scenes and ability to capture the essence of neighborhood life in New York City, often observed through his Chelsea studio window. Sloan has been called "the premier artist of the Ashcan School who painted the inexhaustible energy and life of New York City during the first decades of the twentieth century" and an "early twentieth-century realist painter who embraced the principles of Socialism and placed his artistic talents at the service of those beliefs." More  John Sloan



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