Maritime & Marine Drawings

Maritime and marine drawings typically feature scenes of docks, harbors, and vessels including steamships and sailboats in the midst of traversing the seas. Maritime and marine drawings can also include tableaus or taxonomic portraits of marine life.

Collectors enjoy maritime and marine drawings for a variety of reasons, including the age old yet continually evolving tradition of navigating the seas by boat, or a personal connection to the ocean. Many are also attracted to maritime and marine drawings due to the intrinsic beauty of the sea, its inhabitants, and the nautical vessels that travel across its surface.

The tradition of maritime and marine drawing appears seemingly as old as the advent of boats themselves. Petroglyphs featuring reed watercrafts dating back to roughly 12,000 B.C. have been discovered in modern day Azerbaijan. Maritime paintings spiked in popularity during the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century, as sailboats amounted to a vital tool for Imperial expansion, and again during 19th-century Europe as the steamboat became an increasingly popular means of transportation.

Quick Facts

• Impressionists including Claude Monet produced a number of maritime scenes such as "Cliffs and Sea Saint-Adresse," which depicts the cliffs of Normandy in the foreground with steamboats in the distance
• Winslow Homer, one of the great early American artists, created a prolific number of maritime drawings, often depicting fishing and sailing leisure scenes
• Maritime and marine drawings appear to constitute a fundamental human interest, appearing in various incarnations by practically every culture in close proximity to the sea