The Elusive Ocean

O to have been brought up on bays, lagoons, creeks, or along the coast.

--Walt Whitman

The sea has always been an intoxicating experience for the artist. Tranquil and turbulent, uncontrollable and cruel, the ocean eludes him in a way that other scenes do not. Landscapes are firm and familiar; still lifes intimate. Portraits, by their very nature, are personal. But the seascape must represent the aloof and detached ocean, and it is this defiant refusal to bend to man's control that has driven painters to conquer the sea on canvas. In a refreshing summertime exhibit, the Newark Museum has mounted two dozen marine paintings that show the various ways in which 19th century artists sensed the waters' many moods.

Perhaps no American artist understood the sea better than Fitz Hugh Lane. His ancestors were among the first to settle in the famous fishing port of Gloucester, Mass., where Lane was born in 1804. Partially paralyzed by a childhood illness, he relied on friends to row him out into the harbor where he could sketch and paint, seeking to grasp the precise feeling of the time of day and the weather in New England. An 1848 harbor scene, The Fort and Ten Pound Island, Gloucester, typifies Lane's airy style. The exactitude of his portrayal of the bustling seaport--the clutter of logs, cut boards and barrels surrounding workmen on the quays--is set off by a serene panorama of sailing vessels in the background.

Like Lane, English-born Thomas Birch also delighted in painting harbors and coasts. Brought to America in 1794 when he was only fifteen, Birch settled in Philadelphia and immediately went to work with his father, an accomplished engraver and painter of enamels. Although he was never a sailor. Birch had a profound feeling for the structure and beauty of ships. In a View of the Harbor of Philadelphia from the Delaware River, Birch shows that he understood even better the element they travel in. Although his seascapes varied --some being stormy and violent--this harbor view is marked by a luminous sky and glassy, placid water.

One of the highlights of the Newark show is Monet's relatively unknown Cabane de Douanier `a Pourville, painted in 1882. Faithful to his impressionistic concern with light and color, Monet soaks the scene in sunlight. The Mediterranean, glimpsed from a hill, is cool and inviting, spreading out before the eye in a blaze of blue. Except for a few puffs of cloud, the sky is empty. Monet used only bright colors in this painting--reds, blues, greens and yellows --and he painted thin. The effect is purposely misleading; the viewer suspects that underneath the pigment lies not canvas, but porcelain.

Another delight is the work of the neglected American painter, William Trost Richards (1833-1905), whose Twilight on the New Jersey Coast might be described as a vision of the archetypal summer sea. Vast and lonely, the painting is devoid of human life. Gently lapping breakers touch the shore, and on the far horizon is a lone ship. On a small patch of beach a gull inspects some flotsam. The ocean is the Atlantic, but it could just as easily be the Indian, the Pacific, or Homer's wine-dark Aegean Sea.

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