During the age of fighting sail, artists painted ships and seamen in highly realistic fashion, and most such paintings date from their own day. That was a long era, but square-rigged wooden-hulled warships were a stable technology, and taste in depicting them was stable, too.
The best-known artist working this honorable vein today is probably Geoff Hunt, whose paintings grace the covers of Patrick O’Brian’s great series of historical novels, and Hunt is very much a realist. Like his predecessors, he focuses almost entirely on the ships themselves. Sheer accuracy counts for a lot in Hunt’s paintings, and there is much to be said for all that detail and precision: Square-rigged warships were the most elaborate, expensive, and impressive machines built across several centuries. They went a long way toward securing for Europeans the mastery of the world, and it is interesting to get a sense of their beauty and intricacy.