Seagulls, by Albert Joseph Moore, ARWS (1841-1893). 1871. Oil on canvas. 60 x 27 inches (152.4 x 68.5 cm). Collection of the Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead, accession no. BIKGM:1172. Image courtesy of Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, reproduced via Art UK for purposes of non-commercial academic research.
Moore exhibited Sea-Gulls at the Royal Academy in 1871, no. 520, the most important of the three works he exhibited that year, and one of the most impressive of his single-figure designs. One wonders if this work may have been influenced by G.F. Watts's earlier Thetis that he had exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1866. Both show solitary female figures standing by the seashore, although in Watts's case the figure is nude.
Early on, A.L. Baldry described Sea-Gulls as representing "a large-limbed, classically proportioned maiden walking on a beach." He continued:
She wears a robe of transparent black, which is half concealed by an ample drapery, thin in texture, and in colour a pale greenish grey. On her fair hair is a black cap, in which is placed a bright red flower, a colour accent repeated in the rosy shells at her feet. The beach is warm grey, and is strewn with white rocks, half covered with dark sea-weed. Sea and sky are both treated in tones of grey, and two grey sea-gulls are introduced at the top of the picture. The wind, blowing briskly, stirs the draperies into violent movement, and they flap and cling about the tall figure of the girl, as, with both hands, she holds them in their place. There is something especially impressive in the simplicity of the colour scheme, which is really an arrangement in grey…. The handling of the surfaces, and the treatment of the different textures, are thorough without being laboured; and the design of the picture as a whole is masterly in its order and well considered relation of line to line. [40]
More recently, Robyn Asleson analyses the design in some detail, noting that Moore "introduced obvious analogies between the liquid patterns of the sea and the rippling and splashing motion of the figure's hair and drapery" (121). Asleson notes that this reflects Moore's use of the principle of parallelism:
Thus, the long horizontal waves of the ocean gradually coalesce into the ridges and valleys they have imprinted in the sand, and these lines are echoed in the figure's clinging drapery, which the wind has shaped into another succession of parallel crests and hollows. The analogous patterning of fabric and water relates Moore's painting to the marine subjects through which his brother Henry explored "the sequence and rhythm of wave movement" with "the analytical knowledge of a scientist" ... The drapery treatment in Sea-gulls also calls to mind the reclining goddess of the Parthenon's east pediment, whose hips, thighs and calves are moulded in the same way by encircling coils of drapery. Moore also emulated classic relief sculpture, emphasizing the contrast between the static horizontals of the background and the zigzagging diagonals of the figure's limbs and drapery. [121]
The series of paintings by Moore of a woman standing by the sea, including Sea-Gulls and its later pendant Shells, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874, brought him into conflict with his great friend James McNeill Whistler who was concerned that these works make his similar paintings for the so-called Six Projects seem imitative. This was not a prospect Whistler, who prided himself on originality, could countenance. Whistler asked Moore whether "we may each paint our picture without harming each other in the opinion of those who do not understand us and might be our natural enemies. Or more clearly if after you have painted yours whether I may still paint mine without suffering" (qtd. in Asleson, 119-20). Whistler asked their mutual friend, the architect William Eden Nesfield, to arbitrate. Nesfield reported to Whistler on 19 September 1870: "I strongly feel that you have seen and felt Moore's spécialité in his female figures, method of clothing them and use of coloured muslin also his hard study of Greek work. Then Moore has thoroughly appreciated and felt your mastery of painting in a light key…. In answer to your question 'could each paint the two pictures without harming each other in the opinion of those who do not understand both' I am quite certain you both may. The effect and treatment are so very wide apart, that there can be no danger from the vulgar fact of there being, shore, sea, and sky and a young woman walking in the foreground" (qtd. in Asleson, 120). Despite this favourable report from Nesfield, Whistler was to abandon this type of composition and the Six Projects (Freer Gallery, Washington) remained as full scale oil sketches.
Moore exhibited his full-sized cartoon, in black chalk on brown paper, for Sea Gulls at the Winter Exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880. It is now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (accession no. D.228-1905).
Contemporary Reviews of the Painting
W.B. Scott in The Academy reviewed Moore's three contributions to the Royal Academy exhibition, admiring their design and draughtsmanship, but found his work "more and more purely decorative, and singularly trivial in motive or meaning." He was especially critical of the way he painted his model's flesh. Admitting his "'gifts' in power of drawing and sense of beauty," he complained that "he persists in a thinness of colour and effect, making solid bodies look like sections or veneers, and his flesh is so feeble that there is absolutely no reality in his figures, and, lovely in design as they are, no enjoyment to be found in looking at them" (261). The Architect took a different view, admiring Moore's design and colour: "Mr, A. Moore has grace in his designs, and frequently refinement in colour. In Sea Gulls the drawing of the lady walking by the sea is very satisfactory. The light diaphanous dress is blown closely to the person, and we see that the artist has studied from the nude rather than from the clothed figure" (286). A critic for The Art Journal had something else to add, noting the influence of Japanese art on Moore's "classic" art: "Albert Moore, brother of the last artist [J. C. Moore], exhibits three products more directly classic, viz.: Sea Gulls (520), Battledore (597) and Shuttlecock (601). Here the forms, especially the draperies, are classic, while the colours incline to tender and tertiary harmonies made known in this country by large importations of Japanese screens" (176).
F.G. Stephens in The Athenaeum admired both Moore brothers' colour harmonies, while once again expressing concerns about Albert's draughtsmanship:
In his portrait of Mrs. E. Langton (515), a study in harmonies of blue, Mr. J.C. Moore displays an excess of devotion to a very precious element of Art, and has allowed it to override all others. Mr. A. Moore has done the same, but, great as is his error, he is not under the bonds of portraiture. Nevertheless, the portrait is more solid and thorough in execution than the decorative pictures - Battledore (597), Shuttlecock (601), and Sea-Gulls (520) - are; yet its colouring is inferior in refinement to the last, which embodies harmonies of yellowish white with many defects of drawing. Mrs. Langton is more complete than Sea-Gulls, and therefore finer, as a whole, although not so as an exercise in a single quality. Sea-Gulls represents a Greek damsel in yellowish white robes walking on the shore, and before the wind, which tosses her draperies violently. As an exercise in one order of Art, this production is nearly perfect, and, questionable as its outlines and contours are, they show a marked improvement of the picture of last year. [693]
W.M. Rossetti in The Spectator questioned whether Moore's methods of oil painting could at all be compared to those of the great Old Masters:
For beauty of design in drapery, however, one rather turns to Albert Moore's pictures, which besides breathe an air of purity quite distinguishable from the too Paphian atmosphere of Mr. Leighton's works. On the other hand, the pale chalky tints affected by Mr. Moore (and by certain others, as, Mr. Barclay and Mr. Armstrong, who have little of his taste for beauty of line), guiltless, as they are, of any depth or brilliance of colour, and strangers to the dignity and tenderness of a well-informed chiaroscuro, force upon us the question, can this be that same art of oil-painting which was practised by Rubens, Velasquez, and Titian? However, we may well be grateful for Mr. Moore's pleasant reminiscences of the later Greek art which decorated the houses of the luxurious Romans. This hankering after Greek costume is, no doubt, a protest against the ugliness of modern dress, and so far respectable. [704-05]
A reviewer for The Saturday Review identified Moore as being a prominent member of a clique which consisted of artists who identified with Italy, and Capri in particular, and which also included Walter Maclaren, Edgar Barclay, and Thomas Armstrong:
The mannerism of these painters reaches a climax in Sea-Gulls (520), Battledore (597), and Shuttlecock (601), by Mr. Albert Moore. The title of Sea-Gulls is affected, forced, and irrelevant. Why not tickle sentiment by a dozen other titles as much to the purpose? We might suggest, for example, "pebbles," "seaweed," "bathing," "flying," "swimming." To ordinary sense this maiden on the shore would appear simply…. But why all this? Apparently only because it is the habit of the school to elect the commonest incident of every-day life by means of a treatment unreal, far-fetched, and affected. Yet the drapery is of classic subtlety and the attitudes seem suggested by marbles in the Vatican. As to the colour, of course it can be nothing so flaunting or violent as Venetian; in fact, the chromatic concord holds relationship with Japanese screens which sell at threepence apiece. Or, to speak more sympathetically, the prevailing tone is of an azure sky ere nightfall, or as a southern sea rippling between blue and grey, with phosphorescent light playing over shade. It were a pleasure to speculate further as to the possible future of this abnormal school. It is a delight, in fact, to escape from the dreary routine of the old trade carried on within the Academy. Yet this new school is too much afflicted with dolce far niente to achieve greatness. It lacks stamina and physical force; it will break down in the battle of styles, in the conflict of life. [666-67]
Bibliography
Asleson, Robyn. Albert Moore. London: Phaidon, 2000. 118-121.
Baldry, Alfred Lys. Albert Moore: His Life and Works. London: George Bell and Sons, 1894. 40 & 42.
Christian, John. Victorian Dreamers. Masterpieces of Neo-Classical and Aesthetic Movements in Britain. Tokyo; The Tokyo Shimbun, 1989, cat. 48, 127-28.
Hedberg, Gregory. "Albert Moore." The Victorian High Renaissance. London: Lund Humphries, 1978, cat. 75, 146-48.
Prettejohn, Elizabeth. Art for Art's Sake. Aestheticism in Victorian Painting. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. 114-16.
Rossetti, William Michael. "Art. The Royal Academy." The Spectator XLIV (10 June 1871): 704-05.
"The Royal Academy." The Architect V (3 June 1871): 286.
"The Royal Academy." The Art Journal New Series X (1 July 1871): 173-80.
"The Royal Academy." The Saturday Review XXXI (27 May 1871): 666-67.
Scott, William Bell. "The Royal Academy Exhibition." The Academy II (May 15, 1871): 261-62.
Seagulls. Art UK. Web. 30 August 2026.
Staley, Allen. The New Painting of the 1860s, Between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. 144-45.
Stephens, Frederic George. "Fine Arts, The Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 2270 (29 April 1871): 533.
_____. "Fine Arts, The Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No.2275 (3 June 1871): 691-93.
Created 30 August 2026