Natural beauties of the world such as the ocean will never cease to capture the attention of artists. Their calming colours and flowing movement go hand in hand. The impressionism art movement in the 1870s and 1880s is the perfect style for which oceans and their sailors could be represented. As you make your way down the gallery, you will notice an increase of intensity as the water becomes slightly more aggressive and the colours become darker. This is to show hoe the impressionist style is not limited to simplistic colours and landscapes such as Paul Signacs painting. Signac’s painting consists of three main colours: white, blue, and orange. The land does not have much to it apart from the added depth to the picture. The sea is painted to look like its vibrating with his use of pointillism. Gustave Caillebotte’s painting Sailing Boats at Argenteuil is a well-balanced oil on canvas. The light reflecting off of the sea creates vertical lines while the bridge cuts through, creating a horizontal line. He too generated the sense that the water is moving. The much more active-looking La Seine au Point du Jour by Sisley has heavily applied paint to both the sky and the water to give it its bold look. This landscape also has some balance due to the shore line houses that cuts between the two blue elements. Van Gogh’s painting is a part of a series he created out of painting of elegant sailboats out to sail. This particular one finally shows the appearance of white caps coming ashore. He manages to maintain interest despite how monotone it is; the white from the sails and waves break up the blue to create depth. Finally we get to Monet’s Rocks at Belle-Île to finish off the gallery. This one is obviously quite different from the rest of the paintings. The color pallet focusses more on brown, black, blue and orange. He uses white just to simply highlight the reflexing of the sunset against the harshness from the rocks. He painted the sea in horizontal lines and the rocks in vertical lines to really differentiate from the two. Together they unite to beautiful portray seascapes rendered by a variety of artists from the impressionist movement that we could marvel upon today.
