The work of Charles Brooking remains one of the better kept secrets in the history of British art. A painter of exceptional brilliance and delicacy, he was to eighteenth-century marine painting what George Stubbs was to eighteenth-century equestrian art. Born in 1723, Brooking took a traditionally humble genre of painting, the workmanlike depiction of ships and their paraphernalia, and elevated it to an altogether new level. His pictures are grand and profound, uncannily attuned to effects of nature such as the ephemeral play of light on water.

Brooking is less well known than he should be, partly because his career was short and partly because the voracious American collector Paul Mellon picked up many of his finest works for a song during the 1950s and 1960s. Many of those pictures are now owned by the Yale Centre for British Art, a vastly well endowed but relatively little attended museum of British art in New Haven, Connecticut. In Britain, the Greenwich Maritime Museum holds the largest public collection of Brooking’s work. The institution has served him well, while also contributing to his fossilisation as a mere specialist in sea-pieces. Compelling evidence to the contrary is to be found at the Foundling Museum, in London, which owns the most spectacularly monumental of all Brooking’s seascapes, a picture to stand comparison with any of the masterpieces of English eighteenth-century painting. But the Foundling Museum itself is somewhat off the beaten track, so the artist’s reputation has continued to languish.

“The Call of the Sea” is a small but captivating exhibition in the modest rooms of the St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery, Lymington. Curated by David Joel, the foremost expert on Brooking’s art, the show consists of approximately fifty works drawn largely from private collections in this country. The focus is on...

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