ART REVIEW : Seaworthy Exhibition at the Huntington

They say that in the British Isles one is never more than 70 miles from the sea. Gertrude Stein speculated that the condition of island people dictates certain patterns of behavior. She said that the geographic isolation of the English and the Japanese fostered their shared qualities of insularity and politeness. Maybe that’s why they also both have art heavily based in narrative and inclined to seductive stylization. Maybe that is why both, although tiny, grew great from built-in expansionist pressures.

These thoughts and more are triggered by “Images of the Sea,” the Huntington Gallery’s engaging exhibition of 50 English marine watercolors and drawings. They’ve been deftly selected from holdings of some 17,000 works on paper by curator Shelley Bennett. One generally thinks of these jewel-box shows as connoisseur’s exhibitions, but this one could surprise its organizers, as did a recent Los Angeles County Museum of Art showing of Dutch maritime art called “Mirror of Empire.” Where everyone expected a worthy exercise attracting specialists and scholars, they got a bumper audience encompassing local yachting buffs, votaries of abstract painting and shadings in between. The ocean attracts everybody from realists to romantics and visionaries.

British maritime painting got rolling late in the 17th Century when the English began to outpace the Low Countries in mercantile power. Dutch marine painter Willem van de Velde set up shop in the sceptered isles with his son and fueled a new tradition in much the same way the German Hans Holbein the Younger had inspired the greatness of British portraiture.

Although indebted to Dutch tradition, English marine painting soon found its own characteristic reaction to scenes of the sea--literary, dramatic and deftly entertaining.

Every ocean voyage is a kind of linear adventure that implies a story. No painting here escapes the feeling that it represents a moment in movement. The beginning came before, the climax is now or later. Samuel Scott’s “Men of War on the Thames” implies the ceremonial culmination of some great affair of state. It’s slightly exaggerated Rembrandtesque drawing style puts a certain wry twist on the business. A cozier aura enlivens genre scenes of crossing the English Channel from Dover to Calais. It’s a quotidian adventure experienced by generations of ordinary tourists exhilarated by the smell of brine and a bit queasy in the tummy. In a way it will be too bad when the Brits and the French finish the channel tunnel. The passing of a tradition.

Here, Joseph Clarendon Smith’s “Channel Packet” shows a group of early 19th-Century passengers on an open deck trying to enjoy a picnic despite a breeze stiff enough to steal your bowler. Philip James de Loutherbourg’s roughly contemporary “Landing From the Calais Packet” is a slightly subtler burlesque. In it, all the experienced passengers trudge wearily off the boat while one young chap, evidently on his debut voyage, is clearly excited by the romance of travel. Not surprisingly, the artist, like a noticeable number of others in the show, was a theatrical scene painter.

British genius for drama is part of its legend. Noel Coward saw himself as possessing little more than “a talent to amuse.” Evelyn Waugh used a fictional stand-in to opine that an excess of charm is the downfall of English art. One thought of Shakespeare reminds us that’s not the whole story. Visual seduction does, however, play its role. Alfred Herbert had a practical background in seafaring that helped him get the details right. But he was a sharp observer and fine technician as well. The tall ship in his “Off the Nore” is lovely, but the transparency of his green roiling sea makes watercolor look like, well, water. Clarkson Stanfield’s ethereally calm “Seascape” proves that the use of the economies of designer’s tricks is not always a bad thing.

Anatomizing any art can caricature it to some extent. What an art boils down to is less important than what it adds up to. In the end, English art shows a mastery of style at bottom not unlike that of the Japanese. Here we see it again and again. John Sell Cotman lent an eerie enchantment to a glistening light that clings to everything like glowing dust. J. M. W. Turner’s genius for capturing the ominous side of Romantic excitement shows in a tiny image of men pulling a net from an angry sea.

John Constable gives the appearance of a plain-spoken man telling us the facts. Perhaps the apparent absence of guile is the ultimate in style. The mastery of manner here includes a Thomas Rowlandson romp into landscape that is slightly raunchy in spite of itself. There are swashbuckling romantics. William Roxby Beverley makes you see Errol Flynn in a pirate movie. A visionary like William Turner of Oxford made a moonscape that predicts the American Alfred Pinkham Ryder.

Truth to tell, American art profited greatly from what its British ancestors brought with them across the sea. We got a sense of art made by free people acting as individuals. The legacy has stood us well to this day.

* The Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino; to Oct. 4, closed Mondays. Information: (818) 405-2141.