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Art since 1900

European and American Art

William Bell Scott was an associate of the group of British painters who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. As the name suggests, these artists had a particular admiration for the Italian forerunners of the painter Raphael. Yet some of them were even more strongly influenced by the microscopic realism and jewel-like color of fifteenth-century Flemish painting, and by the ideal of an almost scientific truth to nature.

In its accurate rendition of the forms of rock, wave and cloud, and above all in its evident determination to equal the actual glowing color of a sunset, this seascape shows what the critic Ruskin meant when he described Pre-Raphaelite art as "the downright and earnest effort to paint nature as in a looking-glass".