Vasily Yakovlevich (William Baltazarovich) Beringer was a Symbolist painter of the later period of Russian academic art. He was born in 1875 in a small village called Alexanderhilf (near Odessa). After graduating from the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1899, he earned the title of painter and mosaicist. He died in 1942 during the siege of Leningrad.
Following the tendency of Romantic marinists of the early 19th century, Symbolists of the early 20th century often turned to the image of the sea. The symbolic and romantic content of the painting “Sailing Ship” is built on the combination of reality and symbols, coming directly from the artist’s imagination. Following the Romantic aesthetic principle of perpetuating exceptional moments, Beringer depicted a stormy sea, confronted by a lonely sailing boat out of Russian fairy tales, which looks similar to boats in the paintings of his contemporaries — the Russian Art Nouveau artists Nicholas Roerich and Ivan Bilibin, who turned to the historical past of Russia.
The painting is endowed with Romantic qualities and is based on a classic landscape composition, where the depth of space is achieved by using successive horizontally arranged grounds. It is an exciting feeling of cosmic and tragic events taking place in the world in 1914, which had a dramatic influence on the fates of people, states, and consequently the whole world.
Vasily Beringer, who created many seascapes, combined his ideas of the sea with a lot of symbols in this painting. It shows the boundless, mighty sea and sky, an old Russian sailing boat — a symbol of deep-rooted traditions, struggling with the waves of fate, and the bright light of a persistent lantern on the deck, which is a symbol of hope of reaching the land, and with it — salvation, peace and harmony.
The artist created a convincing image of a surging sea. The color palette of the composition is distinguished by a complex combination of different tones of one color, which conveys the depth and transparency of the waves. The image of the cloudy sky in the painting enhances the anxiety and the feeling of an impending unpredictable outcome of the struggle between the small boat and the forces of wind and waves. The pinkish and purple hues of the puffy clouds, combined with the unusual color of the moon and the reflections it casts on the waves add a touch of fantasy to the landscape.
