ART REVIEW : The Sea and Its Majesty : Exhibit: Treasures from Greenwich, England, maritime museum, at Museum of Art, are big, historic and thrilling.

On a windy, rainy day like that of the recent preview of “The Great Age of Sail: Treasures From the National Maritime Museum,” images of stormy seas and majestic-yet-doomed battleships seemed unusually appropriate for this balmy town. The waters in this show, which opens Saturday at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park, are not for sport.

Nor is this just a sportsman’s show. Scheduled to coincide with the America’s Cup competition, it should attract the attention of serious boatspeople. But it will also appeal to anyone who likes the art of painting. It is filled with exquisite works of art and great stories.

The collection of 80 paintings and 20 model ships, tools, globes and other objects comes from the National Maritime Museum of Greenwich, England, the most respected such museum in the world. The appearance here of these impressive selections from the museum’s vast holdings--its collection contains 4,000 paintings and more than 3,000 ship models--is a coup, a tribute to the San Diego museum’s ambition and the British museum’s desire to increase its visibility.

Greenwich is not the best-known tourist stop, and according to even the maritime museum’s directors, that museum is not as splendid a place to see these works as the installation here. There, these enormous and light-filled portraits and seascapes by the likes of Joseph Mallord William Turner, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Willem van de Velde and Canaletto are squeezed in between masses of other nautical objects. For this show, many of the paintings have been cleaned, and here, for the first time, are being given their due in terms of space. And they look great.

We are not used to seeing large history paintings in San Diego--most of the old master paintings here tend to be easel size--but this show is full of big, big works. The masterpiece among them is the 8 1/2-foot-high “Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805” by Turner, done in 1823. Like all of Turner’s paintings, it is a study in light, with a luminescent glow that seems otherworldly. The light envelops the central image of the British warship Victory, which led Vice Adm. Lord Nelson’s crucial battle against the French and helped rob Napoleon of strategic sea power.

Aiming for accuracy, Turner is said to have sought the help of marine painter John Christian Schetky when he painted Victory, although the work has long been criticized for technical inaccuracies in the depictions of the ship’s rigging, the color of the vessels and their placement. With the distance of time, it’s easy to forget such details, though, and see this as a magnificent clash between massive, cannon-laden ships. Turner had a tendency to cluster images, and here the morass of struggling humanity in the foreground of the work is echoed by the rows of ships that flow into the dim, vast space of the background.

The British painter Arthur William Devis’ “The Death of Nelson, 21 October, 1805,” done in 1809, hangs nearby, and this picture beautifully complements the action of Turner’s work. In the closing stages of the battle, Nelson was hit and carried down below, where he was attended by a surgeon, chaplain and other officers. News of his impending death was kept from the battling sailors, however, who fought on above.

Devis portrayed Nelson at the moment of his death, attended by his surgeon and chaplain in the hold of his ship. Some details of fact have been altered here, too: Nelson doesn’t look wounded and the setting has been exaggerated. But this picture, like the Turner, was meant to memorialize a crucial moment in British history, and its emotionalism still has impact.

Some of the smaller, more incidental paintings are compelling for the way they choose to tell a tale. Among these is an early 17th-Century work attributed to the Dutch painter Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen showing the wreck of the Dutch ship the Amsterdam. In a narrative that, strangely, starts from the right and moves left, the painting shows in sequence the ship at night, battling the storm, then crashing, then being ripped to shreds on the rocky shore. Survivors are shown climbing up the cliffs, and rays of sunlight in the skies above show promise of safety. None of this has the flavor of realism, though the ship itself carries the name of the City of Amsterdam.

Also included are a number of portraits of naval officers, some of them by the most important painters of the 18th Century, such as Reynolds, who was a president of the British Royal Academy and is considered by some to have led portraiture from the tradition of stiff formality into the emotional Romantic period. Reynolds’ portrait of Commodore Augustus Keppel is included here.

Picture after picture here mixes drama and history, and it is almost as fun to read the labels accompanying these works as looking at the pictures.

The greatest disappointment though, is in the final portion of the show. In an attempt to pay hommage to the America’s Cup competition, a few modern sporting pictures have been included, and these awful works of art--impressionistic hack jobs--don’t even stand up as sport pictures.

They are a sad ending to an otherwise majestic effort, a dead moment in a surprisingly thrilling show.

“The Great Age of Sail: Treasures from the National Maritime Museum” continues through Oct. 11. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Admission is $5. Students and children 6-17 $2. Information: 232-7931.