Waters

Milton Avery
Red Rock Falls
1947
oil on canvas
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

Tom Thomson
Smoke Lake
1915
oil on canvas
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario

Johann Michael Wittmer
Panoramic View on the Islands of Delos
ca. 1840
watercolor on paper
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Gustave Caillebotte
Canal Bank
ca. 1872
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Balthasar Wigand
View across the Danube to the Kahlenberg and Leopoldsberg
ca. 1825
gouache on paper (cabinet miniature)
Lichtenstein Museum, Vienna

Alexandre Calame
Lake Geneva looking toward Villeneuve
1833
watercolor on paper
British Museum

Alex Katz
Ocean View
1992
oil on panel
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Georgia O'Keeffe
Lake George
1922
oil on canvas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Eugène Édouard Soulès
View of Étretat
before 1876
watercolor on paper
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Algernon Talmage
The Lake District for Holidays: Honister Crag
ca. 1925
oil on canvas (design for poster)
National Railway Museum, York

Neil Welliver
Prospect Stream
ca. 1990
oil on canvas
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin

Caspar van Wittel
View with Cascata dell'Aniene, Tivoli
1723
oil on canvas
Villa Cerruti, Castello di Rivoli

Lesser Ury
Tiergarten in Winter
1892
pastel on paper
private collection

Frederick W. Watts
Barges on the Thames
1830
oil on canvas
River and Rowing Museum, Henley-on-Thames

James McNeill Whistler
The Sea, Pourville
1899
oil on canvas
private collection

Mary Bradish Titcomb
Town across the Water
before 1927
oil on canvas
private collection

Giuseppe Zocchi
View of the Tiber with Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome
before 1767
oil on canvas
private collection

from The Statesman

I knew a man who used to say,

Not once but twenty times a day,

That in the turmoil and the strife

(His very words) of Public Life

The thing of ultimate effect

Was Character – not Intellect.

He therefore was at strenuous pains

To atrophy his puny brains

And registered success in this

Beyond the dreams of avarice . . . 

– Hilaire Belloc (1930)

Eaux

Jacques-Laurent Agasse
La Fontaine Personnifiée
1837
oil on canvas
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Emile Burdet
Pyramids of Cheops and Khafre reflected in Flood Water
ca. 1885
albumen print
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Jeroen Krabbe
Suriname River at Danpaati II
2006
oil on canvas
Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands

Agricol-Louis Montagné
Fountain at Nîmes
ca. 1910
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes

Gaetano Gandolfi
Design for Fountain
ca. 1785-95
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Jørgen Roed
Fountain in Gardens of Villa Borghese, Rome
ca. 1839
oil on canvas
Nivaagaard Museum, Denmark

Hubert Robert
Wall Fountain
1767
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Susanne Maria von Sandrart after Jean Le Pautre
Fountain Design with Salmacis and Hermaphroditus
1678
etching
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Franz Sigrist the Elder
Fountain with Nymphs
ca. 1760
etching
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Abraham van Diepenbeeck
The Deluge
ca. 1636-39
drawing
(print study for illustration to Ovid)
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld
The Deluge
1826
drawing
(print study for Bible illustration)
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Friedrich Reclam
Staircase with Cascade in a Park
ca. 1760
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Thomas Ender
Ladder Falls near Heiligenblut
1845
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Franz Kobell 
Landscape with Waterfall and Temple Ruins
before 1822
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Adrian Zingg
River Keppbach near Dresden
ca. 1780-90
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen,Dresden

Lucas van Valckenborch
Mountain Landscape with Waterfall
1595
oil on panel
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

And yet Leonardo, if anyone, knew that the artist's desire to create, to bring forth a second reality, finds its inexorable limits in the restrictions of his medium.  I feel we catch an echo of the disillusionment with having created only a picture that we found in Lucien [sic] Freud when we read in Leonardo's notes: "Painters often fall into despair . . . when they see that their paintings lack the roundness and the liveliness which we find in objects seen in the mirror . . . but it is impossible for a painting to look as rounded as a mirror image . . . except if you look at both with only one eye."

Perhaps the passage betrays the ultimate reason for Leonardo's deep dissatisfaction with his art, his reluctance to reach the fatal moment of completion: all the artist's knowledge and imagination are of no avail, it is only a picture that he has been painting, and it will look flat.  Small wonder that contemporaries describe him in his later years as most impatient of the brush and engrossed in mathematics.  Mathematics was to help him to be the true maker.  Today we read of Leonardo's project to build a "flying machine," but if we look into Leonardo's notes we will not find such an expression.  What he wants to make is a bird that will fly, and once more there is an exultant tone in the master's famous prophecy that the bird would fly.  It did not.  And shortly afterward we find Leonardo lodging in the Vatican – at the same time when Michelangelo and Raphael were there creating their most renowned works – quarreling with a German mirror maker and fixing wings and a beard to a tame lizard in order to fighten his visitors.  He made a dragon, but it was only a whimsical footnote to a Promethean life.  The claim to be a creator, a maker of things, passed from the painter to the engineer – leaving to the artist only the small consolation of being a maker of dreams. 

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960).

Aquatic - I

Carl Kuntz
Falls of the Rhine near Schaffhausen
1793
watercolor and gouache on paper
Kunsthalle Mannheim

Anonymous Swiss Artist
Fireworks over the Rhine Falls at Schaffhausen
ca. 1890
postcard
Graphische Sammlung, Zentralbibliothek Zürich

Anonymous Swiss Artist
Fireworks over the Rhine Falls at Schaffhausen
ca. 1910
postcard
Graphische Sammlung, Zentralbibliothek Zürich

John Mix Stanley
Palouse Falls
1860
lithograph
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Gustave Courbet
Falls of the Doubs
ca. 1855-60
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice

Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich
Waterfalls at Tivoli
1744
etching
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Lovis Corinth
Walchensee with the Slope of the Jochberg
1924
oil on canvas
Landesmuseum Hannover

Charles Cushman
Ocean Beach from Sutro Heights, San Francisco
1952
Kodachrome slide
Indiana University Library, Bloomington

Félix Vallotton
Evening View of Trouville
1910
oil on canvas
Clemens-Sels Museum, Neuss, Germany

Frits Thaulow
Behind the Mills, Montreuil-sur-Mer
1892
oil on canvas
Lillehammer Kunstmuseum, Norway

Per Christian Brown
Tiergarten
2014
C-print
KORO (Public Art Norway), Oslo

Marinus Pieter Reus
Bridge over a Ditch
ca. 1890
oil on canvas
Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands

Kalle Berggren
Bathing Platform
1976
gouache on paper
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Karl Theodor Reiffenstein
Wooden Sluice
1860
watercolor on paper
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Christian Rohlfs
The Sternbrücke, Weimar
1887
oil on canvas
Osthaus Museum, Hagen, Germany

Johan Rohde
Evening by the Karup
1889
oil on canvas
Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen

For the Grecians in old time, and such barbarians as in the continent lived near unto the sea or else inhabited the islands after once they began to cross over one to another in ships, became thieves and went abroad under the conduct of their most puissant men, both to enrich themselves and to fetch in maintenance for the weak, and falling upon towns unfortified and scatteringly inhabited, rifled them and made this the best means of their living, being a matter at that time nowhere in disgrace but rather carrying with it something of glory.  This is manifest by some that dwell on the continent, amongst whom, so it be performed nobly, it is still esteemed as an ornament.  The same also is proved by some of the ancient poets, who introduce men questioning of such as sail by, on all coasts alike, whether they be thieves or not, as a thing neither scorned by such as were asked nor upbraided by those that were desirous to know.  They also robbed one another within the mainland.  And much of Greece useth that old custom, as the Locrians called Ozolae, the Acarnanians, and those of the continent in that quarter, unto this day.  Moreover, the fashion of wearing iron remaineth yet with the people of that continent from their old trade of thieving. 

For once they were wont throughout all Greece to go armed because their houses were unfenced and travelling was unsafe, and accustomed themselves, like the barbarians, to the ordinary wearing of their armour.  And the nations of Greece that live so yet, do testify that the same manner of life was anciently universal to all the rest.  Amongst whom the Athenians were the first that laid by their armour and growing civil, passed into a more tender kind of life.  And such of the rich as were anything stepped into years laid away upon the same delicacy, not long after, the fashion of wearing linen coats and golden grasshoppers, which they were wont to bind up in the locks of their hair.  

– from The Peloponnesian War as written by Thucydides (5th century BC) and translated by Thomas Hobbes (1628) and edited by David Grene (1959)

Rendering Water

Garofalo (Benvenuto Tisi)
Baptism of Christ
ca. 1520-25
oil on panel
Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama

Michele Greco after Polidoro da Caravaggio
Naval Battle in Antiquity
ca. 1560
etching and engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Jan van Goyen
A Calm
ca. 1646-50
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Jean-Baptiste Armand Guillaumin
The Seine at Charenton
(black factory smoke as a delightful contrast against white clouds)
1874
oil on canvas
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California

Thomas Eakins
Susan Macdowell with the Crowell children in Avondale, Pennsylvania
1883
albumen silver print
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Alexander Henderson
Victoria Rink
before 1884
albumen silver print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Peter Henry Emerson
Gathering Water Lilies
1886
platinum print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Peter Henry Emerson
Setting the Bow Net
1886
platinum print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Pietro Fragiacomo
Veduta di Venezia
ca. 1890
oil on canvas
(sold at Christie's London, 2020)
private collection

Emily K. Herron
Untitled
before 1893
cyanotype
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Spencer Gore
The Pool, Panshanger Park
1908
oil on canvas
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Birge Harrison
A Puff of Steam
ca. 1910
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Emanuel Phillips Fox
The Ferry
ca. 1910-11
oil on canvas
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Childe Hassam
The South Ledges, Appledore
1913
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Spencer Gore
Landscape with Pond
1913
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Elioth Gruner
Rolling Hills, Yass
1929
oil on canvas
private collection

Donald Deskey
Design for Bathmat, Rockefeller Apartment, New York
ca. 1929-31
gouache on paper
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Insomnia

The moon in the bureau mirror

looks out a million miles

(and perhaps with pride, at herself,

but she never, never smiles)

far and away beyond sleep, or

perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,

she'd tell it to go to hell,

and she'd find a body of water,

or a mirror, on which to dwell.

So wrap up care in a cobweb

and drop it down the well

into that world inverted

where left is always right,

where the shadows are really body,

where we stay awake all night,

where the heavens are shallow as the sea

is now deep, and you love me.

– Elizabeth Bishop (1951)