Poseidon God of the Sea — Print & Oil Painting

Watch the crest of the wave. Along the top of it the water stops behaving like water: four or five horses form out of the foam, necks arched, manes streaming, forelegs folded beneath them, each one made of nothing but turquoise, white and the dark hollow behind it. They dissolve back into spray before they finish.

That is not the artist showing off. The Greeks worshipped Poseidon as Hippios, god of horses as well as of the sea, and credited him with producing the first horse, while teams of them draw his chariot in the poetry. A breaking wave that turns into a herd is the shortest available statement of both offices at once.

The god is small in his own painting and seen from behind, which is unusual and effective. A muscular back, brown hair blown sideways, a rough loincloth, the right arm thrown up holding a plain three-pronged trident on a wooden shaft. He is wading at the foot of a wall of water that rises past the top of the frame.

The colour is essentially one hue used at every value: viridian in the deep water, turquoise where light passes through it, chalk white in the foam, and a network of pale veins running down the face of the wave. Only the grey storm sky in the upper right corner escapes it.

One of two Poseidons in our Ancient Greece collection, and the still, colourless answer to this one is the marble colossus indoors.