Constantinos Romanides

Marine art can be traced back to the wall paintings of royal barges in Egyptian tombs dated 1360 B.C., and the voyages of Odysseus were illustrated on Greek vases of the 5th Century B.C. Glimpses of ships and ports appear in medieval manuscripts and in the frescoes and altarpieces of the early Renaissance in Italy.

Initially a product of the naval and commercial preoccupations of the great maritime nations, marine painting flourished from the 17th Century onwards in the Netherlands and Great Britain. Specialist marine painting, the main patrons of which were naval officers, shipowners, and shipmasters, made exacting demands on the artist; he had to unite accurate ship portraiture with the rendering of water, light, and atmosphere. Often he had to depict a precise moment in a complex naval engagement. In addition to the world of public commissions and acknowledged artists there developed, from the mid-18th Century, a thriving trade in ship portraits that were commissioned by shipowners from 'pierhead artists' in many ports, including Copenhagen, Marseilles, Naples, and in Malta, as well as the major ports in the United Kingdom and the USA.

Marine painting finally emerged as a distinct genre in Greece in the 19th Century, through the works of Constantinos Volanakis, Ioannis Altamoura and Vasilios Chatzis. From then on a market developed for marines, which was fed by these artists and those of future generations, such as Emilios and Eleni Prosalentis and Constantinos Romanidis. Contrarily to his predecessors, Romanides, rather than portraying ships or naval battles, focused on seascapes, such as the present work, in which the interest lies in the broader depiction of atmospheric effects and the behaviour of the sea in various conditions rather than the accurate, detailed depiction of vessels.