Marine painting

Marine painting (Ukrainian maryna, from Italian marina, Latin marinus, “of the sea”) is a landscape genre devoted to the sea, and a picture showing a sea view. It belongs chiefly to painting and graphic art and also occurs in painted porcelain and faience. An artist who works mainly in the genre is called a marine painter; the name itself dates from the nineteenth century.

A work in which the sea is only a backdrop to a portrait, a history scene or a scene of everyday life is not a marine. English-language museum terminology divides the field into two concepts: marines, works concerned with ships, shipbuilding and harbours, and seascapes, works in which the water itself dominates; the Ukrainian term covers both. It should not be confused with marynistyka, which the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine defines as a kind of literature with sea subjects.

Sea motifs are known from the ancient civilisations, but sea views became independent subjects of landscape in the Netherlands in the mid-sixteenth century, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century marine painting took shape there as a separate genre. Later masters include J. M. W. Turner and Ivan Aivazovsky, the author of about 6,000 pictures of the sea. In Ukrainian art, marines include Taras Shevchenko’s watercolours from the Aral expedition (Moonlit Night on Kos-Aral, Schooners near Fort Kos-Aral); in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the genre was developed by V. Puzyrkov, Yu. Yehorov and others.