A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas, 1773 Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-1789)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Claude-Joseph Vernet also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A green wave curls behind the people on the shore, its white crest almost level with their heads. They have reached land, but not safety. On a flat rock near the center, companions gather around an unconscious woman; nearby, survivors struggle uphill with salvaged belongings. A small dog picks its way across the foreground. These scattered, urgent movements give the storm a human scale.

In A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas, painted in 1773, Claude-Joseph Vernet makes the sky feel almost as unstable as the water. Charcoal-gray clouds press down across most of the canvas, while lightning forks through an orange glow at the right. Below it, the nearer ship leans sharply, its masts and rigging forming a tangle of diagonals. A second vessel pitches farther away, close to the rocky coast. Between them, a few seabirds skim above the swell. The waves are dark green rather than blue, with pale foam catching along their ridges.

The shore offers little shelter. At the upper left, a twisted tree reaches out from the cliff; below, water spills from rock to rock in white streams. Broken timbers crowd the lower right corner. Vernet sets the small, rounded forms of bodies against jagged stone and the long, slanting lines of the ships. Even the heavily armed vessels are helpless here. Their convincing construction reflects his close study of ships, although this particular disaster is imagined. For eighteenth-century audiences, shipwreck was a familiar danger, not simply an exciting subject for a picture.

Vernet conceived this storm alongside a calm marine scene. The pair was commissioned for the Polish king, but Lord Clive bought both paintings directly from the artist in 1773. Their contrast brings together two pleasures much discussed at the time: the beauty of peaceful nature and the sublime, that mixture of fear and fascination aroused by forces beyond human control. Here, the foreground figures keep that fascination from becoming too comfortable.

There is light beyond the disaster. Behind the lighthouse, a break in the clouds reveals pale mountains and a stretch of sunlit coast. It may suggest that the weather will clear, though nothing nearby yet feels secure. The lighthouse itself remains unlit, a dark upright against that distant brightness.