An accomplished landscapist, marine painter, watercolorist and draftsman, Gudin was trained in the classical tradition but quickly succumbed to the influence of Romanticism. Gudin is famous for his dramatic seascapes. Here the stippled texture and scraped white areas of the print conjure vaporous mist and turbulent seas that engulf a sinking ship. The motif of a boat adrift on rough seas is a well-known metaphor for man’s lonely destiny and ultimate insignificance before the power of nature and God. Such romantic notions of the sublime clearly influenced Tanner’s Christ Walking on the Water.