"Storm at Sea (The Wrecked Ship)"

Watercolour

9 1/2 x 13 1/4 inches (24 x 33.5 cm)

Signed, lower left

Framed in a simple gold frame

SOLD

A wonderful "Sublime" watercolour by an English painter believed to have known the great JMW Turner and certainly much influenced by Turner's furious seascapes.

Thomas Gray Hart was an English painter of landscapes and seascapes. He passed much of his life based in Southampton on England's south coast and ships and harbour subjects form a good part of his output, possibly in order to produce commercial paintings for sale.

He was also, however, a gifted painter of Romantic, even Sublime, subjects as his oil paintings of the ruins of Netley Abbey or ships silhouetted at sunrise or sunset show. Both subjects display a strong affinity with the work of Caspar David Friedrich (although it is debatable whether Hart knew this particular painter's work) and chime more generally with the romantic Gothic taste of the early nineteenth century.

It is thought that Hart was acquainted with the great JMW Turner, painter of Romantic and explosive shipping scenes and seascapes. Hart's work was favourably compared with Turner's in the catalogue of a memorial exhibition for Hart at Southampton in 1897, the centenary of his birth.