Seascape painting, or marine art, is a separate genre of fine art, where the main subject of the painting is the sea. The term comes from the word marinus (Latin for “pertaining to the sea”). As an independent type of painting, maritime art was formed in the Netherlands in the 17th century with the advent of paintings, where all the artist’s attention was paid to the element, while ships and people acted as secondary characters.

In Russian art, one of the brightest representatives of the marine artists is the landscape painter Eugen Dücker. Eugen Gustav was a landscape painter, teacher, academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts, member of the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions. Dücker can be attributed with equal grounds to both the German and the Russian school of painting.

He was born on the island of Ezel in the Baltic region. Dücker received his academic silver and gold medals at the Academy of Arts for the views of Livonia. In his further work, Dücker constantly returned to the motives associated with dear to his heart childhood, which took place in the Baltic Sea. At the same time, for most of his life he painted in Dusseldorf.

Dücker preferred to depict a more realistic image of nature than was customary at the Dusseldorf school. In his work, he was influenced by the artists Oswald and Andreas Achenbach. While in Europe, he would send a small number of paintings to academic exhibitions in St. Petersburg. Most of the paintings were bought up by Western European private collectors and museums. In Russian museum collections, the works of Eugen Gustav can be found extremely rarely: the painting “Sea Shore” came to Voronezh as a result of the evacuation of the University of Tartu during the First World War.

The landscape presented in the work “Sea Shore” can be found more than once in the paintings of Eugen Dücker. In each story, lonely characters who have found peace and freedom in the water surface look at the sea together with the viewer. Dücker’s works are characterized by a desire for the authenticity of an image based on a careful study of nature. The artist’s style is also distinguished by lyricism and the ability to convey various states of nature.