The sea and its pictorial representation have been one of the most developed art genres since many centuries ago. From the classical, serene seascapes by Fitz Hugh Lane to the contemporary visions of Richard Diebenkorn, the audacious Japanese painting or -of course- the incomparable Joseph Turner, theArtWolf has proudly showcased 10 of the most beautiful, intrepid, important seascapes in the world. Such list, of course, is absolutely subjective, but some of the names in it are unquestionable.

10- FITZ HUGH LANE

BECALMED OFF HALFWAY ROCK, 1869 (Washington, National Gallery)

Oil on canvas, 70.4- 120.5 cm .

Considered as one of the great all-time marine painters, Lane is arguably more a "naval portraitist" than a traditional seascape painter. In this highly appealing canvas, the artist brilliantly portraits two large ships, accompanied by three support boats, surrounding a little rock that, although small in size, earns a fundamental importance in the composition.

9. IVAN AIVAZOVSKY

THE NINTH WAVE, 1850 (Saint Petersburg , State Museum)

Oil on canvas, 221- 332 cm .

A seascape devoted painter, Aivazovsky reaches in this painting an absolute technical perfection, representing a group of unlucky castaways trying to survive under the merciless charges in form of oceanic waves. Nevertheless, the centre of the composition is the powerful, almost mystical and diffuse representation of the sun, which illuminates the scene with a strange, oneiric range of green and pink shades.

8. CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH

THE MONK BY THE SEA, 1809/10 (Berlin Nationalgalerie)

Oil on canvas, 110- 172 cm

Contrary to the glorious calm of the Lane or the dramatic exuberance of Aivazovsky, here we face a much more difficult work. The notorious horizontality of the picture and the evident contrast in the scale of the Monk, almost insignificant compared to the sea's magnificence, fill the picture with a quite uncertain romantic message. Is the sea a neutral background behind the Monk's deliberations, or perhaps are we attending a strange dialogue between he and the never-ending ocean, a mystical mirror of the monk's thoughts?

7. FREDERICK EDWIN CHURCH

THE ICEBERGS, 1861 (Dallas Museum of Art)

Oil on canvas, 163.2- 285.1 cm .

The icy death. Beautiful and exuberant at first glance, this masterwork by Frederick Edwin Church is nevertheless a sinister and terrible romantic document, showing the remains of a shipwreck, where it really doesn't matter if the sailors have survived or not: the merciless icebergs will soon kill them if the violence of the accident has not done it before. The brutal beauty of this canvas makes the Titanic story looks like a bad joke.

6. RICHARD DIEBENKORN

OCEAN HORIZON, 1959 (Private collection)

Oil on canvas, 177.8- 162.6 cm .

Diebenkorn's urban seascapes present a unique and contemporary vision of the ocean: domesticated, friendly, desirable . Contrary to his abstract and more complex Ocean Parks , the Ocean Horizon presents a very simple composition with three evident levels for the land, the sea and the sky, all of them framed in a rectangular window. Following the crooked line marked by the electric lines, the ocean looks as accessible as the little coffee cup that we can see in close-up.

5. CLAUDE MONET

LA TERRACE DE SAINTE-ADRESSE, 1867 (New York, Metropolitan Museum)

Oil on canvas, 98.1- 129.9 cm .

This glorious painting presents an evident parallelism with Diebenkorn's canvas representing the sea (here the Atlantic Ocean ) as friendly, accessible, even as a recreational area to the idle society. Again, the composition is divided in three levels -sky, sea and land- and is vertically organized by the two large flags fluttered by the ocean breeze. The painting is so delightful that we are immediately tempted to sit on one of the empty chairs to enjoy this sunny Sunday afternoon. Apart from this kind seascape, Monet also represented the sea full of fierceness and fury in paintings such as "La Manneporte" .

4. WINSLOW HOMER

THE GULF STREAM, 1899 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Oil on canvas, 71.5- 124.8 cm.

All the kindness and charm that the sea presented in the two precedent canvases is crushed in this devastating painting by Homer. Really, the terrible expressivity, bordering on macabre of the work makes unnecessary almost every commentary, while we assist helpless to the tragic end of the unlucky sailor, represented with a effective exaggeration, perhaps an evidence of Winslow Homer's formation as a press reporter.

3. THEODORE GERICAULT

THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA, 1819 (Paris , Louvre)

Oil on canvas, 491- 716 cm .

Very few can be said about this well-known work that you had not read before. Gericault creates a painting that we can define as "politically incorrect", as it depicts the miseries of a large group of castaways abandoned after the shipwreck of the Medusa ship. We can even say that the picture is not exactly a seascape, but a classic triangular composition in which the human emotions are graduated from the exacerbated hope of those that -situated on the top of the pyramid- have sighted a saviour ship, to the man that- holding the corpse of a young man, perhaps his son- has abandoned any hope and is resigned to wait for his death. In Gericault's work the sea has no charm, no beauty, no kindness: is the villain, the killer, the predator that, lying in wait for new victims, is patiently waiting for its time.

2. KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI

THE WAVE, c.1830

Engraving, 25.4- 38 cm .

The Japanese painters and engravers have always offered us a different, almost mystical vision of the natural phenomena. The wave is her much more than a mere oceanic circumstance. It's a monster, a giant leviathan that menaces with its canines the agile and audacious ships that cross, flexible, the Japanese seas. The terrible ocean's claw is so powerful that threatens to devour even the sacred Mount Fuji , presented at the background as another victim of the evil wave.

1. JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER

THE FIGHTING TEMERAIRE, 1839 (London, National Gallery)

Oil on canvas, 91- 122 cm .

Any of the other nine spots from this list is debatable, but not this one. Turner is the greatest seascape painter from every age, and at least another two or three works by the British painter (Ulysses mocking Polyphemo, Peace - exequies on the sea) can easily figure on this list if I had not take the decision of include only one work from an individual artist. Audacious and technically perfect, Turner's masterpiece is an unusual representation of a royal ship, normally depicted in its maximum splendour as Fitz Hugh Lane did in his seascapes, but here Turner tributes the brave Temeraire depicting its last trip before being scrapped. This supreme work was elected as the best painting in England in a poll organized by the National Gallery of London in 2005.