How artists have depicted—and shaped—society’s relationship with the sea

With their hues of azure and aquamarine, ability to both calm and frighten, and tantalizing unknowability, seas and oceans are subjects ripe for visualization. Artists have represented these transcendent but formidable regions for millennia—and shifted society’s relationship to the shoreline in the process.

“The sea is both beautiful and dangerous,” says Ann Kuttner, associate professor of history of art at Penn, citing shipwrecks and wars. “Art lets you play with danger and exercise your fears. You can make it sexy and interesting.”

In recognition of the summer season and its associated beach vacations, Penn Today spoke with Kuttner about portrayals of the sea in ancient Roman art and with Benjy Jude, a rising third-year art history Ph.D. student, about 19th-century French seascapes.

Rendering fantastical sea creatures and everyday life

“I’m always interested in how Romans depict for themselves the world around them,” says Kuttner, a scholar of Hellenistic and Roman history and material culture. Their art showed the importance of the Mediterranean Sea in daily life, their interest in the variety of marine life, and the sea as a place of imagination.

Kuttner is researching the Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of Augustan Peace), focusing on how the relief-covered political and religious monument depicts landscapes. In a panel honoring Venus’ dominion over land and sea, the goddess sits on a rocky island, nursing babies with animals at her feet, while a sea nymph riding a sea dragon and a river nymph come to honor her.

She is also studying Rome’s Temple of Neptune, which once housed famous statues of the goddess Thetis bringing arms to her son Achilles, surrounded by tritons and sea nymphs. “You could walk into this room and be surrounded by undulating beings with fishy tails,” Kuttner says.

Fantastical sea creatures like nymphs and dragons were often featured in luxury art that aristocrats displayed in their homes, temples, and public spaces, she explains. (Interestingly, she adds, ancient art of the Mediterranean Sea did not include mermaids—only mermen, or tritons.)

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Kuttner notes that even amid the Christianization of the Roman Empire by the 4th century, wealthy aristocrats continued owning pieces with mythological imagery. “We love mythology, and we love to think and imagine,” says Kuttner, drawing a parallel to today.

The ancient Romans also portrayed more realistic subjects, like fishermen, harbor infrastructure, and lighthouses. Kuttner says that various sculptures and paintings showed fishermen as either happy little cupids or as isolated, gnarled, and weatherbeaten.

Kuttner thinks that art shapes conceptions of the sea “as a place of awe and wonder and pleasure.” It also, she says, appeals to people’s desire to imagine its non-human inhabitants, from animals to the numinous spirits believed to live beneath the waves. “It has to me almost this note of yearning in it, what you can never really know.”

The impact of 19th-century French seascapes

Jude is focusing his graduate studies on 19th-century European art, and two classes he took at Penn this spring—Environmental Literature and Media and Architectures of Land and Sea—led him to an interest in researching 19th-century French seascapes.

These works are important in part because the shore of Normandy was one of the essential locations for the birth of impressionism and thus modern art, Jude says.

He is particularly interested in Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). Working in the town of Étretat, Courbet painted a series of seascapes called “The Wave” or “Waves “in 1869 and 1870, with ominous gray or taupe clouds atop white-crested spilling waves of teal and juniper. Some show the shore while others do not.

“He’s negotiating: How much stable ground should I give you?” Jude says. “It’s sublime. It is totally terrifying to look at these waves coming out. They’re totally menacing, they’re totally threatening, but they’re also totally beautiful, totally captivating. You can’t look away.”

Jude views this representation of the sea as “a provocation” from a realist painter with anarchist politics, as he contends that Courbet was surely aware of the French government’s desire to conquer the sea and to overcome public perception that the French were too terrestrial. France was the second-greatest empire at the time, and Jude argues that when Courbet admired and painted the sea, he celebrated seemingly the only environment the French state could not control.

Courbet inspired painters such as Édouard Manet (1832-1883), who also painted on the coast of Normandy. Manet relished painting the same society he was painting in Paris but in a different environment—the newly touristic beach, rather than the city.

The artist who brought Courbet, Manet, and the Impressionists to Normandy, Jude says, was the French landscape painter Eugène Boudin (1824-1898). A native of the region, Boudin watched and painted the modernization of the coast.

The ruling elite have visited coastal locales since antiquity, perceiving the sea as healthful and restorative, Jude notes. But the beach became increasingly popular and accessible to the middle class in the 19th century—partly due to the impact of art, whether willingly or not, advertising it.

Boudin documented the transformation of coastal towns into tourist resorts with casinos and restaurants, Jude explains, painting fancifully dressed tourists. In this way, he and other artists—who depicted beach tents and boardwalks—were not just capturing a static scene but depicting the shoreline as a place that changed and was changed by society.

“That’s why the French output of seascape paintings—or paintings of the coast—gets so much attention and has so much weight,” Jude says, “because it is somehow expressive of modernity.”