#storm

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.

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.

This was the first of the jungle scenes, from what I can find, and it got laughed at when it went up. He was painting around a customs job with no training anyone respected, and he said the plants came out of the Paris hothouses and picture books rather than anywhere hot.

Bellows made his name painting boxing matches and packed city crowds — this coastal storm is a quieter side of him, painted during a summer away from all that.

Supposedly he painted the sea from memory indoors rather than out in front of it, and turned out thousands over a lifetime — storms and wrecks by the dozen, selling about as fast as he could make them.

He apparently got stuck on this one for months, until his studio partner told him to just repeat the German word for flood — Überflut — instead of thinking it through. He finished the whole painting three days after that, still repeating the word the whole time.