Discover beach paintings for sale. Showcasing art from some of the most exciting beach painters active today, our collection is ever-evolving with. Browse today to find the beach painting for you, with a variety of styles and subjects available. Not sure where to start? Take a look at our popular impressionist and abstract beach paintings.
About the artists
To help guide you, we’ve have highlighted four of our best seascape artists
Annabelle Shelton,
Viacheslav Rogin and
Corinne Natel.
A critical reimagining of British beaches can be found in Annabelle Shelton’s Beach Tide (2016) Shelton plays with colour and perspective as she packs bodies tight onto the curve of an invisible shore. We love the subverted shift of focus in Shelton’s work from landscape to human subject.
Viacheslav Rogin’s Cefalutano (2016) is a more muted mise-en-scene depicting the calm nature of two moored boats. Soft hues and a cropped composition stir feelings of peace and contentment. We believe Rogin’s work would appeal to more traditional tastes.
Finally, Corinne Natel’s Seashell #2 (2019) is like looking headfirst into a dazzling rockpool. Natel’s use of mixed media creates a detailed layering effect which mimics that of a thousand year old crystal or precious stone. The circular shape of the painting keeps the work modern and would compliment any well-designed space beautifully.
History of Beach Paintings
Beach paintings are a form of landscape art, a genre heavily concerned with capturing the beauty of nature. While landscape painting can be dated back to Ancient Greece, Egypt and 4th-century China, it only truly emerged as a respected form in the West during the Renaissance. The popularity of coastals scenes has caused beach paintings to splinter from the genre of landscape art.
Picasso, Monet and Van Gogh have all contributed to the subgenre of beach painting through their hypnotic capturing of the coastal. In the West, this form of painting is closely associated to the tradition of Romanticism which came to the fore early in the 15th century.
Despite now being considered a subsection of landscape art, many beach paintings originated from the marine art movement which similarly centres around the ocean. Marine art was a genre of painting which began in the Dutch Golden Age.
Such paintings featured large ships to demonstrate the naval and trade power of the Dutch. However, during the Romantic period, the image of the coast and the sea was reclaimed by landscapists, whose work began to exclude such vessels.
Development of style
Ancient seascapes
The Minoans were one of the first cultures to create landscape paintings void of any human subject. Inside the Minoan Palace in Crete there lives the famous fresco of a pod of dolphins, dated to be around 3,000 years old.
Around the 15th century, oceans were becoming a subject of interest for ancient communities. The Egyptians were depicting bodies of water and waves in their hieroglyphics as well as creating artistic impressions of oceanic deities like Sobek, the Nile God.
Marine Art
The van de Veldes, a father and son painting duo, first brought marine art from the Netherlands to Britain in 1673. This was the first instance Britain had taken notice of seascapes and beach paintings, despite the coast being a common theme in French Impressionism.
This style was characterised by brooding seas, darkened storms or behemothic boats boasting of power. During the age before photography, there was also a practical function to such paintings. Instead of charts, naval captains would navigate using illustrations of coastal views created by sailors. Many marine artists such as Nicholas Pocock or Thomas Buttersworth in fact began as sailors.
Marine art continued to flourish in Britain, eventually leading to the creation of the Society of Marine Artists in 1939. British artists like Norman Wilkinson painted dramatic scenes of battle during the war years and fervently celebrated the Royal Navy.
In the middle of the 1800s the beach was no longer seen purely as a site of trade or battle, but instead was reimagined as a playground. Artists such as John Constable painted the joy of sea-bathing in Brighton, and for the first time the coast was captured as a place of leisure.
Ships still featured in some beach paintings, however usually somewhere along a horizon while the fore is occupied by people, fish, seabirds or waves.
