The Sea

The Sea, painted in 1872 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, belongs to the final group of paintings Kensett produced before his death that December. A marine subject rather than his characteristic lake views, The Sea demonstrates the same Luminist reduction of landscape to horizontal bands of water and sky that characterized his Lake George paintings. Kensett had painted along the New England coast throughout his career; his 1872 coastal paintings achieved an extraordinary atmospheric simplicity. The subject of open ocean offered even fewer compositional elements than Lake George's enclosed lake — only water, horizon, and sky — pushing his reduction of landscape toward its furthest extent.

Oil on canvas with a horizontal format emphasizing the sea's endless extension. Kensett's late marine technique renders the water surface with subtly varied horizontal strokes distinguishing wavelets from flat swells, the sky above handled with the delicate tonal gradations from horizon to zenith that give his atmospheric effects their distinctive quiet luminosity.