Since the mid-1700s, artists have looked towards the sea as a constant source of inspiration for their work. Some artists were drawn to wild, solitary, remote from what the poet, Edward Thomas called ‘the parochialism of humanity’, and wide open places, and others to flotsam and jetsam found on the beach.

Many of the artists in this exhibition identified themselves with a particular stretch of the shoreline, a particular viewpoint from the edge of the sea, and in painting it, they tended to shape anew the way we see it.