But, even then, few painters had realized the wonderful pictorial possibilities of the sea. There were some who attempted marine subjects and coast scenes but only as occasional diversions from their ordinary course of study--as illustrations of their capacity to deal with nature in any phase or mood, or it may be to gain experience in what was to them a novel kind of material. Probably in the eighteenth century an excursion to the coast was something of an adventure for men who lived inland; facilities for travel were very limited, and it was easier for an artist to record the subjects which were conveniently within his reach than to struggle against difficulties to reach places remote from his home. Moreover, his clients were mostly stay-at-home people, too, who knew the sea only as a sort of vague abstraction, as something they had heard about, but of which they had no personal knowledge, and therefore their interest in it was too indefinite to be remunerative to him. It was more to his advantage to paint the things they knew than to make them realize what seemed to them strange and surprising. Anyhow, nearly all the earlier painters of marine subjects were men who had some particular reason for taking to this line of practice. One of the first--Charles Brooking, who was born in 1723--was brought up in Deptford Dockyard, and as a not unnatural consequence acquired considerable skill in the representation of shipping and naval incidents. During the latter part of his short life--he died at the age of thirty-six--he gave some instruction to Dominic Serres, a Frenchman by birth, who was a foundation member of the Royal Academy and was appointed to the post of Marine Painter to the King. Serres had been a sailor, and was captured by an English frigate in the war of 1752 when he was in command of a trading vessel; he settled in this country, and with Brooking’s assistance and a good deal of hard work on his own part became a painter of repute. In his choice of the direction he followed in his art he was, like Brooking, influenced by his earlier associations and by the desire to treat pictorially material with which he was thoroughly conversant.