“Dark-heaving, boundless, endless and sublime;
The image of eternity...”

hese words from Byron are often quoted by Julian when he gives talks about his work and reflects on his special feelings for the sea. As no other subject, the sea has inspired both artists and writers over the centuries.

Jonathan Raban, in his anthology The Oxford Book of the Sea, points out that one of the earliest works in the literature of English is a powerful poem about the sea. “The Seafarer” was copied, possibly from an oral source, perhaps from a written one, into the Exeter Book, a miscellany of Anglo-Saxon writing, which dates from the year 904.

Even Jane Austen had something to say about the sea: “The terrific grandeur of the ocean in a storm, its glassy surface in a calm, its gulls and its samphire, and the deep fathoms of its abysses, its quick vicissitudes, its direful deceptions...”

The earliest known pictures of ships and boats are those which decorate Egyptian pottery of the period around 3200 BC. However, the true birth of marine painting, that is the portrayal of the sea itself as well as the ships that sailed on it, occurred in Holland in the later part of the sixteenth century, coinciding with the ascendancy of maritime power of the Dutch.

Perhaps the sea is a vast metaphor of the human condition.