#sea

He's usually filed with the Fauves — the 'wild beasts' famous for screaming colour — but apparently what he actually loved was grey weather and busy water, and he spent years travelling around Europe painting one port after another.

The story that went round was that he'd had himself lashed to a ship's mast for hours in a real storm to see one properly — apparently that claim has been doubted for a very long time now. The critics of the day weren't kind either; one of them dismissed it as soapsuds and whitewash.

A whole movement got its name from a review mocking this one — the critic used the word as an insult, supposedly, and it stuck. It hung in a show the painters put on themselves after the official one kept turning them down.

This is the myth of Leander, who used to swim across the strait most nights to visit Hero — until a storm caught him and he drowned. What you're looking at is apparently the moment after: sea nymphs pulling his body from the water, with Hero said to have thrown herself in after him.

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.

According to Wikipedia it stands on the riverbank in Lisbon where the ships actually set off for India and beyond, and it was put up to celebrate that whole age of sailing out to explore and trade — or to conquer, depending on who's telling it.

The story goes that he spent years painting quiet, brownish landscapes, then late in life switched almost overnight to thick, crusted paint like this — and apparently it baffled the people who'd been happily buying the brown ones.

It's painted on canvas rather than a wooden panel, which was still an odd choice at the time, and it seems to have been made for a Medici cousin's country house rather than a church. Who exactly ordered it, and what for, nobody seems to have settled.

From what I read, he did a whole series like this — women in white, blazing sun, water behind — and collectors couldn't get enough of them at the time.

Sailors reckoned waves arrive in runs and the ninth one is the one that finishes you — supposedly that's where the name comes from. He was a navy painter by trade and, from what I've read, worked from memory in the studio rather than out in front of the water.

About as approved-of as painting got at the time — the emperor apparently bought it straight off the Salon wall. Two years later Manet showed a nude in a not-so-different pose and Paris was outraged, which suggests the rule was never really about bare skin, but about who was allowed to be bare.

It's a print rather than a painting — one of thirty-six goes at the same mountain, run off the blocks in the thousands and sold cheap, more or less a poster. The blue doing all the heavy lifting was a newish imported pigment then, according to Wikipedia, which is part of why it looks the way it does.