#dark

Wrecks at sea sold well, and this one got engraved as a print not long after, which is supposedly how most people at the time would have run into it rather than in any gallery.

They say he kept a handwritten catalogue of every single thing he made, numbering each one as it left the easel — the pencilled line along the bottom edge is his own filing, not a museum label.

This wasn't made for anyone to see — he painted it straight onto a wall of his own house, in his seventies, deaf and unwell, and it only got peeled off and moved to canvas after he was gone. Nobody seems to agree on what he meant by it, or whether he meant anything at all.

Prints like this come in states: you print a few, then go back and cut into the metal plate again, so the same picture exists in versions that don't match each other. Supposedly he gouged out whole sections of this one between printings and redrew them, and the later version came out far darker than the first.

I tried to look him up and got almost nothing — no dates, barely a paragraph anywhere. Whoever he was, this seems to be one of the few things of his that made it into a collection at all. If anyone knows the story, I'd genuinely love to hear it.