Claude Muncaster On Sale

At the age of 15, the career for landscape painter Claude Grahame Muncaster, RWS, ROI, RBA, SMA began, and he soon took to the seas, spending the 1920s and ‘30s traveling the world with his sketchbook in a series of vessels. With the outbreak of war, he joined the RNVR training as a navigator. Having left school at 15, his understanding of mathematics was very weak, and it was a relief for all when his artistic talents meant he was recruited as a camoufleur.

A master of capturing seascapes, Muncaster was, therefore, able to hide huge ships in plain sight with clever disguises. After the war, he painted for the Royal Family and was a frequent guest at Sandringham. Muncaster was a watercolorist known for his landscapes and maritime scenes.

Born Grahame Hall, Muncaster was the son of the Royal Academician Oliver Hall, who taught his son to paint from an early age. He first exhibited his work at 15 and a few years later was showing at the Royal Academy. However, he adopted the name Claude Muncaster in 1922 to dissociate his career from that of his father. Muncaster’s primary choice of subject matter came from a genuine love of the sea. He made several long-distance sea voyages, including one around the Horn as a deckhand in the windjammer Olivebank in 1931, which he described in Rolling Round the Horn, published in 1933. Armed with a sketchbook, Muncaster aimed to be able to paint ships and the sea with greater authority. This he certainly achieved, perfectly capturing the limpid first light of morning over the Port of Aden, the choppy rain-grey waters of the Bay of Biscay and a streak of sunlight through gathering storm clouds at dusk in Exeter.

Muncaster became an associate of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1931 and was a founding member, and later president, of the Royal Society of Marine Artists. During the Second World War, Muncaster served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) from 1940–44, training as a navigator before going on to advise on the camouflage of ships, and also worked as an official war artist. In 1946–47, he was commissioned by the Queen to produce watercolors of the royal residences at Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral, the Duke of Edinburgh, in a foreword to a biography of Muncaster, recalls looking at these and considering the artist’s unerring instinct for a subject, his sense of atmosphere. Other commissions included large panoramas of the Thames and Bradford. Muncaster's career also included work as an etcher, illustrator, writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and his paintings can be found in the Royal Academy, Tate, National Maritime Museum Cornwall, National Railway Museum and Royal Air Force Museum.

The first decades of the 20th century were a period of artistic upheaval, with modern art movements including Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism and Dadaism questioning centuries of traditional views of what art should be. Using abstraction, experimental forms and interdisciplinary techniques, painters, sculptors, photographers, printmakers and performance artists all pushed the boundaries of creative expression.

Major exhibitions, like the 1913 Armory Show in New York City — also known as the “International Exhibition of Modern Art,” in which works like the radically angular Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp caused a sensation — challenged the perspective of viewers and critics and heralded the arrival of modern art in the United States. But the movement’s revolutionary spirit took shape in the 19th century.

The Industrial Revolution, which ushered in new technology and cultural conditions across the world, transformed art from something mostly commissioned by the wealthy or the church to work that responded to personal experiences. The Impressionist style emerged in 1860s France with artists like Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne and Edgar Degas quickly painting works that captured moments of light and urban life. Around the same time in England, the Pre-Raphaelites, like Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, borrowed from late medieval and early Renaissance art to imbue their art with symbolism and modern ideas of beauty.

Emerging from this disruption of the artistic status quo, modern art went further in rejecting conventions and embracing innovation. The bold legacy of leading modern artists Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian and many others continues to inform visual culture today.

Find a collection of modern paintings, sculptures, prints and other fine art on 1stDibs.

Landscape drawings and watercolors show the world through the lenses of different cultures and perspectives. They were also incredibly important for displaying natural scenes before the invention of photography.

There are many ways to effectively arrange art on your walls so that you’re maximizing your wall space. You can introduce peace and serenity within the confines of a living room or bedroom if landscape drawings and watercolors are part of the art that you choose to bring into a space.

Watercolor landscapes have a rich history dating back to ancient China, where they dominated painting genres by the late Tang dynasty. Ink-on-silk paintings in China featured mountains and large bodies of water as far back as the third century. The Netherlands was home to landscapes as a major theme in painting as early as the 1500s, and by the Renaissance, watercolors had made their way to the West and into European culture, becoming a staple of decorative art.

It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that watercolor paints became more widely available and embedded in fine arts. Despite their broad distribution today, some artists have chosen to revive the old craft of preparing their own watercolor pigments, paying homage to the medium’s roots.

The variety of brush combinations and painting methods makes watercolor landscapes some of the most stunning pieces in any collection. Find landscape drawings and watercolors on 1stDibs.