The Breaking Wave in Paintings 2

In the first of these two articles looking at paintings of near-breaking waves, I showed how unusual they had been before European artists saw Hokusai’s Great Wave in about 1856. After that, Courbet painted a series of them, and during the following decades they became increasingly popular.

Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), Seals on the Rocks, Farallon Islands (c 1872-73), oil on canvas, 66 x 91.4 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

The great American landscape artist Albert Bierstadt only painted about thirty coastal views out of a total of around five hundred catalogued paintings, but at least three of them show breaking regular waves. In May 1872, he visited the Farallon Islands, a group of uninhabited rocks thirty miles to the west of San Francisco, responding with his dramatic Seals on the Rocks, Farallon Islands (c 1872-73).

Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), The Shore of the Turquoise Sea (1878), oil on canvas, 163.8 × 108 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Bierstadt’s wife was diagnosed with ‘consumption’ in 1876, and the following year the couple visited Nassau in the Bahamas, where they hoped the warmer climate would help her condition. During that visit, Bierstadt was inspired to paint The Shore of the Turquoise Sea (1878), showing a wave breaking on the coast there: surely a direct reference to Courbet and Hokusai. Bierstadt also painted a second, larger development from this work after 1878, now exhibited in the Haggin Museum in Stockton, CA, as After a Norther.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), The Wave (1882), oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm, Dixon Gallery and Garden, Memphis, TN. Wikimedia Commons.

Renoir followed in painting The Wave on the Normandy coast in the summer of 1882.

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Seaweed Gatherers I (1888-90), gouache and graphite on grey board, 27.6 × 32.4 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Other French Impressionists and their successors seemed less impressed with Hokusai, preferring different Japonist themes such as tree blossom. The Great Wave found greater enthusiasm with Paul Gauguin and his circle who gathered first in Pont-Aven then Le Pouldu in Brittany. Gauguin’s gouache Seaweed Gatherers I (1888-90) shows two Breton women gathering seaweed on the beach. Behind them is a huge wave, its spume formed into a claw, which surely came from Hokusai.

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), In the Waves, or Ondine (I) (1889), oil on canvas, 92.5 x 72.4 cm, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1889, Gauguin painted two works showing Ondine in the sea among waves. The first, known now as In the Waves, or Ondine (I), also refers to Hokusai.

Walter Crane (1845–1915), Neptune’s Horses (1892), oil on canvas, 33.9 × 84.8 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Walter Crane’s Neptune’s Horses from 1892 is one of a series of paintings he made fusing the horses drawing Poseidon’s chariot with near-breaking waves, popularly known in English as white horses.

Henry Moret (1856–1913), Waves at Pen-men, Île de Groix, (1896), oil on canvas, 73.3 x 92.2 cm, Private collection. The Athenaeum.

Henry Moret, one of the Pont-Aven school, found his Waves at Pen-men, Île de Groix, on the far western tip of the island of Groix, with the mountainous sea for which this part of the Bay of Biscay is notorious.

Georges Lacombe (1868–1916), Vorhor, The Green Wave (1896), egg tempera on canvas, 100 x 72 cm, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN. Image by Zambonia, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Nabi sculptor, and painter from Gauguin’s school, Georges Lacombe took Hokusai’s motif forward in several of his paintings. This is his treatment of Vorhor, The Green Wave in egg tempera, which shows an Atlantic swell coming into the seacliffs of Vorhor near Camaret-sur-Mer in Brittany.

Georges Lacombe (1868–1916), The Violet Wave (1896-97), oil on canvas, 62.5 x 47.5 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Lacombe’s slightly later The Violet Wave also makes its influence abundantly clear.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905), The Wave (1896), oil on canvas, 121 x 160.5 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

In that same year, even the notoriously academic artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau joined Hokusai’s crowd of admirers, in The Wave.

William Trost Richards (1833–1905), Off the Coast of Cornwall (1904), oil on canvas, 55.9 × 91.4 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

My last example of a post-Hokusai near-breaking wave is one of the late marine paintings of William Trost Richards: Off the Coast of Cornwall from 1904. In its impeccably painted breakers are the spirits of Bierstadt, Courbet, and Hokusai himself, who had died in 1849.