Painting underwater

Painters can be intrepid, carrying their pochade box up mountains, deep into caves, across deserts, and in boats, but there’s one place that very few have painted, underwater. Breath-hold diving for food, pearls and coral is an ancient pursuit, but not one conducive to even making lightning sketches. Diving bells don’t seem to have appealed to major artists, and it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that any attempted to depict people underwater, initially in painting the story of Ophelia’s drowning, from William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), The Death of Ophelia (1838), oil on canvas, 37.9 x 45.9 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

It was Eugène Delacroix who first seems to have realised the visual potential in Ophelia’s drowning. His first painting of The Death of Ophelia in 1838 follows Queen Gertrude’s account of events, with Ophelia climbing into a willow tree whose branch breaks, dropping her into the stream below. Delacroix shows her body already partially submerged.

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), The Death of Ophelia (1853), oil on canvas, 23 x 30 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Fifteen years later, in 1853, Delacroix returned to the story and painted The Death of Ophelia again, just as loosely but with richer chroma. Although the artist has reversed the image here, she is still holding onto the branch of a tree, with her left side submerged.

John Everett Millais (1829–1896), Ophelia (1851-2), oil on canvas, 76.2 x 111.8 cm, Tate Britain, London. Wikimedia Commons.

One of the best-known Pre-Raphaelite paintings is John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, painted between 1851-2, in which Ophelia drowns herself in the “weeping brook”. Its background was painted en plein air near Ewell, Surrey, England, during 1851, after which the figure of Ophelia was painted in over the following winter, using as the model Lizzie Siddal in a bathtub full of water.

This is the first depiction to ignore Queen Gertrude’s account in favour of a more tragic-romantic self-drowning. There is a deeper and more poignant tragedy here too, in that Lizzie Siddal, Millais’ long-suffering model for this work, died just a decade later at the age of only 32, from an opium overdose that may well have been suicidal in intent.

Paul Albert Steck (1866-1924), Ophelia (c 1894), media and dimensions not known, Petit Palais, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

It took until about 1894 for Paul Albert Steck to depict Ophelia fully submerged. In common with images of the drowned woman, there is a profound calm, a grace in the streamlines of the weeds, her dress and hair, and a dreadful finality in the last bubbles of air rising to the surface.

By that time, other paintings of drowning women had appeared.

Paul Delaroche (1797–1856), The Young Martyr (1853), oil on canvas, 73.5 x 60 cm, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Wikimedia Commons.

Paul Delaroche’s moving painting of The Young Martyr (1853) shows a young Christian woman whose hands were bound before she was thrown into the River Tiber in Rome, during the reign of the emperor Diocletian (284-305 CE). The writer and critic Théophile Gautier considered her a “Christian Ophelia”, and a paragon of divine beauty.

The other famous drowned woman was the poet Sappho, who is reputed to have thrown herself into the sea from the Leucadian cliffs due to her unrequited love.

Ary Renan (1857–1900), Sappho I (1893), oil on canvas, 56 x 80 cm, Museo Ernest Renan, Tréguier, France. Wikimedia Commons.

Ary Renan painted Sappho at least twice. The first from 1893 shows her reclining amid a fantastic and deep layer of underwater vegetation, her lyre some distance from her head, at the right edge.

The twentieth century brought more diverse underwater views.

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923), The White Boat, Jávea (1905), oil on canvas, 105 x 150 cm, Private collection. WikiArt.

Joaquín Sorolla’s The White Boat, Jávea, combines broken reflections with underwater views, and was painted during his summer campaign on the coast to the south of Valencia in 1905.

Joseph Stella (1877–1946), The Birth of Venus (1922), oil on canvas, 215.9 x 134.6 cm, Private collection. The Athenaeum.

After the First World War, Joseph Stella painted a series of mythical narratives, including The Birth of Venus in 1922. As might be expected, his treatment is completely novel and seems to have benefited from visits to an aquarium. Aphrodite is shown at sea, in the upper part of the painting her upper body above the waterline, and below morphing into an aquatic plant below that, where it finally merges into a helical rather than clam shell.