Food for the Soul: Water, Water, Everywhere…

By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout

Water has always been present in the human mind, important as a life-giving source, but also dangerous as an instrument of potential destruction. Symbolically, an influx of water can also provide a fresh start, a way to sluice the debris of transgressions and evil deeds, which is one of the reasons the myth of flood is so prevalent. The biblical story of a flood of 40 days and nights of rain is deeply embedded in our collective consciousness, not only thanks to the Old Testament but also to similar accounts from many other cultures. Other records of deluge start with the earliest known epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BC) and continue through Greek mythology, Indian tales of Vishnu, African myths, and Aztec creation stories.

Between 1550 and 1560, the Renaissance king Sigismund I, who ruled Poland when it was still a huge and powerful land, commissioned tapestries from famous Flemish manufactories in Arras (present-day France). Out of the 160 tapestries produced, an amazing collection of 136 survives to this day and, with the exception of two, they are all housed at the original location, the Royal Castle of Wawel in Kraków. In the 18th century, the empress Catherine the Great plundered the Polish royal collection, taking it to Russia, where over time some of the weavings were cut into small pieces and sometimes used as furniture upholstery. The tapestries returned to Poland in 1921, but less than 20 years later, the German army’s invasion jettisoned the collection into an arduous escape from war-torn Europe. Hundreds of people—museum curators, soldiers, railroad workers, and warship sailors—risked their lives to move the precious cargo from Poland through Romania, France, and Great Britain all the way to Canada. Torn, stained, and covered with dirt and mold, the tapestries eventually returned to the Wawel castle in 1961, and they have been undergoing restoration ever since.

Tapestries picturing stories about the prophet Noah decorate the Senators’ Hall of the castle; one of the most elaborate pictures shows both the ark and rows of animals being directed up the ramp to the life-saving boat. It’s been almost 500 years since the tapestries were woven out of silk and wool threads, but they still preserve their vivid colors. The fragility of thread and fabric makes these well-preserved tapestries a rarity. and the Wawel collection is absolutely unique in its scope and beauty.

Bodies of Water

Water falls from the sky in so many forms—rain, snow, fog, and hail—and all of it has been rendered by numerous artists in countless ways. The very nature of water is quite inspiring for artists since it can, more than any other substance, constantly change its state, texture, and reflected color. Below are two pictures of rain, both painted in the first half of the 19th century, but because they are separated by half a globe and cultural differences between European and Japanese styles, they look completely different.

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) was one of the most famous painters of the ukiyo-e genre, and his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo deeply influenced both Japanese and European art. His Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, from which this illustration of Travelers Surprised by Sudden Rain is selected, was one of his early works when he started painting landscapes in his leisure time (his day job was a fire warden of the Edo Castle, an official function for a son of a minor samurai family). Most of his famous landscape series feature people or at least hint at their presence, depicting various social classes and occupations. The Travelers print is a great example of Hiroshige’s style—a group of people, caught in a downpour, move forward, half-bent against the wind and inadequately covered with flimsy umbrellas and hats. They have no choice but to brave the lashing rain, as they are travelers away from any fixed abode. Hiroshige clad them in bright yellow for a greater contrast with the black streaks of rain—his prints are famous for their bold color choices and the subtle gradation that is used here to its fullest effect.

In the age before photography, it was not an easy task for an artist to capture a fleeting moment of changing weather. John Constable (1776-1837), a giant of English landscape art whose heart was in painting nature but whose wallet required making formal large portraits of patrons for their mansions, once wrote to a friend that “painting is but another word for feeling.” Painted in 1824, the oil sketch of a violent storm titled Seascape Study with Rain Cloud/Rainstorm Over the Sea is a masterpiece in capturing just such a moment of nature’s violent rage. It’s categorized as a “study” in the collection of the Royal Academy—an institution that was, in Constable’s time, a nascent organization dedicated to formal art education and an academic approach to painting. However, this “study” would be very much at home in an exhibition of modern Abstractionists, from Franz Kline to Gerhard Richter. This work is a suggestion of the force of water rather than a realistic picture of water streaks. Constable’s most famous nature views, like The Hay Wain, are meticulously painted views of a river crossing and the surrounding leafy woods. In his Seascape Study, however, Constable is anything but a meticulous recorder of nature’s minutiae. What he paints here is the energy of torrential waters joining the dark clouds and even darker waters of the sea. This is water at its most violent and primal.

What a contrast Constable’s study of a violent storm makes with a painting created almost 100 years later during the early modern era. Lake Keitele, an icy winter landscape that emanates calm, is steeped in Symbolism—a movement that was reacting to the sober and tiresome Academic style of the Victorians. Lake Keitele was painted in 1905 by Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931), a Finnish artist whose style and interest in his native lands, folk mythology, and symbolic art style were typical of the early 1900s. In many countries, and especially in Scandinavia and Central Europe, nationalist movements and an intellectual revolt against realism in art and literature produced the art movements of Symbolism and Primitivism, along with a fascination with folk tales, music, and costumes. Gallen-Kallela painted many beautiful snow and ice images of his native lands, but this picture of a mountain lake is special: the image of a scintillating lake surface is crisscrossed by dramatic gray slashes. Because the artist was steeped in Finnish mythology, the usual interpretation is that these ribbons of air or vapor are the traces of passage by the speeding heroes of the Kalevala saga (the Finnish national epic). If so, Gallen-Kallela would have painted a scene not unlike those in modern comic books, where superheroes’ powers are often rendered by such slashes of lines. In Lake Keitele, this beautifully painted pristine lake water becomes a background for the mysterious activity of water sprites or perhaps the ghosts of old Scandinavian warriors and gods.

If we were to grade bodies of water, from quiet brooks and lakes to swelling oceans, clearly seas provide more dramatic opportunities for painters. The hundreds of celebrated artists who have painted seascapes would attest to this thematic preference. Sometimes, though, the sea itself is not enough of a topic, so artists paint sea waters together with their exotic inhabitants. Long before Robert Wyland started painting his massive Whaling Wall murals, American artists had been fascinated by sea creatures.

Watson and the Shark is a perennially popular painting by John Singleton Copley (1738-1815)—an early American colonist and self-taught painter who was frustrated by the lack of opportunities to develop professionally; he eventually left for England, never to return. He had already emigrated from America when he painted this sensationalist picture of an exotic adventure. Copley was aiming for admission to the Royal Academy, and this was a splashy showcase of his narrative and painterly skills. He was inspired by a famous shark attack experienced some quarter of a century earlier by a teenage sailor named Brook Watson, who was swimming in the waters around Havana. Brook was saved by his shipmates, but not until after he was bitten several times and lost a leg (the handicap did not stop him from achieving later success as Lord Mayor of London and director of the Bank of England). Copley’s painting has been reproduced in engravings and widely distributed, even though the artist himself moved on to paint the more traditional subjects of historical battles and portraits of English aristocracy.

Copley here uses a classic pyramidal composition, traditional in religious and historic paintings, even though the subject is an accident at sea and the central heroic figures are a duo of sailors—one black and one white. The picture is thus imbued with the colonial ideology of courageous endeavor and teamwork by equals—the revolutionary ideals of the New World. For us—the contemporary viewers who have grown up on Jaws and Shark Week advertising—it is the sea creature that is most fascinating here, correctly presented with a triangular fin and oval jaw. Copley must have seen real sharks (perhaps at Boston’s fish markets?), and his talent for veracity of details is evident. This is a very dramatic way to show the difference between the tame waters of an English shore and those of the New World, where everything is larger than life, sea creatures included.

In America, even the seals would have been perceived as more dramatic, as evidenced by this arresting seascape by Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902). The artistic trajectory of this painter was the opposite of Copley’s. Whereas Copley left America for Europe in search of a more sophisticated art scene, Bierstadt’s family immigrated to America from Germany, and he grew up to be a celebrated eulogist of the nature of the Wild West. Today he is most known for his panoramas of Yosemite Valley, but even his more modest setting of a solitary rock off the California coast in Seals on the Rocks, Farallon Islands is shown in a thoroughly romantic way. The green waves are swelling, the seals are posed in a row like shipwrecked mariners, and the skies are threateningly stormy. The seals here look more like humans in peril than marine animals who would be perfectly in harmony with any ocean waters.

The Gifts of Water

Floods, rains, and snowstorms notwithstanding, the presence of water is more often a blessing to people than a threat. Water offers many gifts—food (thanks to fishing), cleanliness (through bathing), respite from heat (through swimming), and of course life itself through the water we all must drink to survive. Artists have illustrated all of these life-affirming miracles of water in many ways throughout the centuries.

Sometimes the miraculous power of water has been expressed through mythology, as in the long-enduring myth of the fountain of youth.

A fountain of youth—a spring or lake that could restore young age to those who encountered its waters—was already a concept in antiquity. By the Middle Ages, this was clearly a myth that people would not have taken literally, but it remained an attractive subject for artists. The late Middle Ages was also a period when, at least in the lands of today’s Germany and Central Europe, regenerative spas were very popular. People would travel to mineral spas such as Baden for curative baths; local landowners would set up spring resorts as commercial enterprises, the same way they would set up town markets. Because the medical science of the time did not offer much except bloodletting and some herbs, bathing in mineral waters served as a popular remedy for healing wounds or skin rashes—and considering the state of medieval hygiene, any skin washing might indeed have been beneficial. Even middle-class burghers would travel to spas for cures, while the nobles would plan extensive stays with their entourages, musicians, and courtiers included.

Therefore, when Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) painted in 1546 his Fountain of Youth, he took a popular legend but set it firmly in the reality of German life of the period. The people, elderly or infirm, who are being brought to the large swimming pool look like the groups of pilgrims or townsfolk who would have traveled to local spas (there are documents about permissions granted for such trips, as well as city funds allocated for citizens’ stays at curative spas). On the right side of the painting, the artist also shows us some other scenes that took place at popular spas—dining, music, and dancing were indeed offered at bath establishments.

Cranach’s painting shows us an enduring human desire. Although the miracle of transforming older, damaged bodies into youthful, energetic ones is unfortunately a myth, it remains a purpose of human quests. Not much has changed—nowadays we try to obtain our youthful looks through aesthetic medicine, cosmetics, or diets, but we chase youth all the same.

If only something so simple as taking a bath at the fountain of youth could make people emerge strong, wrinkle-free, and with all the glow of youth restored.

Belief in the spiritual cleansing power of water is not limited to Western culture. In India, the waters of the Ganges river are used not only for daily washing or drinking but also for ritual cleansing. To this day, millions of Hindu devotees try to improve their karma by taking holy baths during pilgrimages—an event beautifully illustrated in this 19th-century Indian picture.

There is a charming fresco from an Etruscan tomb that shows us, in the minimalist style of a Grecian vase, a diver aiming for a body of water. We are not even sure what he is jumping off from; there are columns suggesting big buildings nearby, but there is no cliff or lake shore. However, the sleek silhouette shows us a very accomplished diver. This painting decorated a tomb in a necropolis of thousands of graves carved in rocks in an area of central Italy. Numerous tomb paintings there commemorated the athletes so highly valued by the Etruscans, not unlike the ancient Greeks. This painting may possibly be a representation of a symbolic jump into another, posthumous world, but it is based on real life in Etruscan society. The Etruscans, a people who lived about two and a half millennia ago, were eventually overcome and absorbed by the Romans, and because they did not leave any written documents, we only have their art to attest to the sophistication of their culture. Nothing much has changed in the way people enjoy swimming on a hot day—diving into a cool body of water is still a recreational pastime and a sports competition category.

Even though the Polish painter Leon Wyczółkowski (1852-1936) studied Impressionism in Paris and Realism in Munich, he would only extract the love of color and light from those artistic movements, arriving at his own way of showing people in a landscape. His favorite subjects were the ploughmen and fishermen of Ukrainian fields and rivers. He painted many formal portraits, historic scenes, flowers, and landscapes, but his most accomplished and prized canvases are those that show farmers digging for beetroots and men casting nets—villagers bathed in the orange or purple light of sunset. Wyczółkowski painted a series of about 30 works devoted just to fishermen casting for fish and crayfish in swamps and rivers at the eastern edges of Poland. The most prominent of these paintings, entitled Fishermen or Casting for Crayfish, is a scene of two busy fishermen emptying crayfish nets. The flaming light of sunset casts a glow on the figures and changes the water’s surface into a heavy mirrored plate. Wyczółkowski spent a decade of his life wandering around villages and forests of the Ukrainian wilderness, trying to capture views of the unspoiled land—rivers, fields, forests—and the people who worked that land every day. The popular artist would be invited to spend summers at the mansions of local nobility, but he often escaped into more modest cottages to be closer to his preferred subject—nature.

The greatest gift of nature to all creatures on Earth is the water itself—and the bigger the creature, the more water it needs. Humans need a minimum of 30 ounces of water per day just to survive, and even more if you find yourself in the desert, as Moses’ tribes did during their 40-year trek across the wilderness.

In the biblical tales of Moses’ peregrinations, the striking of a rock in search of water happens twice. The first time (the occasion usually depicted in religious art), God tells Moses to use his staff against a desert rock to procure a spring of water for his wandering tribe. The second time, Moses fails to fulfill God’s instructions to the letter, and his lack of faith is punished—he is never to see the Promised Land, despite leading his people to Canaan. This spring of living water became an important symbol of Christian faith in divine grace.

The thirst that needs to slaked with life-giving water was portrayed beautifully by Renaissance artist Angelo Bronzino (1503-1572). He was a favorite painter of the Spanish princess Eleonora of Toledo, who was married off to Cosimo I de’ Medici, ruling Florence during his frequent military campaigns. The duchess had her apartments inside the Palazzo Vecchio decorated with exquisite frescoes. The tribulations of Moses and his tribes were to serve as a pious metaphor for Cosimo’s efforts to bring prosperity and sustenance to Florentine citizens. Even if the symbolic meaning of both the biblical original and the Renaissance allegory escapes many modern viewers, we are still left with an eternal image of the life-giving force of water. We renew this relationship with water every time we take a sip.