Seascape prints depict sea, coast and ocean horizon. Inland rivers and lakes are waterscape, not seascape. Use this guide to choose calm versus storm, then browse the Seascape collection.
| 148 works · 39 artists · 6 sizes · from £52.50 | |
| Most represented | Paul Duncan, 43 works |
|---|---|
| Shape of the collection | landscape 61 · portrait 26 · square 34 |
What is a seascape, and what is not
A seascape has the sea in it. That sounds obvious until you are choosing, because three nearby categories get confused with it constantly.
Waterscape is inland water — rivers, lakes, canals, reflections. Landscape may include a coastline but its subject is the land. Coastal is a mood rather than a category; a beach hut photograph is coastal and is not really a seascape.
If the horizon between sea and sky is doing the work, it is a seascape.
Calm or weather?
Seascapes divide more sharply than any other genre into two temperaments, and people rarely want both.
The calm end is long horizons, low contrast, a narrow palette of greys, blues and sand. It recedes, and it suits a room you want to feel settled. The weather end is movement, breaking water, heavy sky, strong tonal contrast. It advances, and it wants a wall with space around it.
Buying the wrong temperament is the most common seascape mistake. A storm study above a bed is a very different night than the one you were picturing.
The horizon line is a hanging problem
A seascape carries a strong horizontal that almost nothing else does, and the eye is unforgiving about it.
Two consequences. First, a seascape shows a crooked hang more obviously than any other subject — a degree of tilt that would pass unnoticed on an abstract is glaring when a sea is running downhill. Use a level, not your eye.
Second, if you are hanging two or more works together, match the horizon heights rather than the frame centres. Frames of different proportions centred on the same line will put their horizons at different heights, and the group will look wrong without it being obvious why.
Hang it lower than you think
Centre a single work at 145–150 cm from the floor, which is eye level standing. Over a sofa, leave 20–25 cm between the sofa back and the bottom of the frame. Seascapes in particular suffer from being hung high, because a horizon above your own eye level reads as looking up at the sea, which is not how anyone has ever seen it.
Scale, and why square is worth knowing about
The collection carries 24 distinct sizes, from 40 × 40 cm up to 120 × 95 cm.
Square is unusually well represented in seascape compared with most genres, and that is worth knowing for two reasons. A square crop shortens the horizon and calms a busy sea. And every one of our diptychs comes from a square original — two panels of 47.5 × 100 cm, about 118 cm across framed — so a square seascape is the format most likely to also be available as a two-panel piece.
Multi-panel and the horizon
Seascapes are the natural subject for multi-panel work, because the horizon carries across the gap and does the joining for you. A triptych spans about 172 cm framed and needs roughly 2.1 m of wall; a diptych is about 118 cm and needs 1.4 m. If your wall is under two metres, the diptych is the honest answer.
Framing a seascape
The moulding question on a seascape is mostly a question about how much of the room you want it to occupy.
A pale mount and a 2 cm Classic or Deep Classic moulding keep the work quiet and let the palette do the work. Venice at 3 cm and Swoop at 3.5 cm make the piece an object in the room as well as a picture, which suits a larger weather study and tends to overpower a calm one.
