The Sea, Painted Straight: Inside the Royal Society of Marine Artists’ Annual Show

Eva Parker | Sep 14

Event: Royal Society of Marine Artists — Annual Exhibition 2026

Venue: Mall Galleries

Location: The Mall, London SW1Y 5BD, UK

Dates: 16–26 September 2026

The Royal Society of Marine Artists opens its Annual Exhibition at Mall Galleries this week, presenting several hundred works — painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, textiles and mixed media — united by a single, unfashionable subject: the sea. Founded in 1939 and granted royal status in 1966, the Society remains, by its own description, the focal point for figurative marine art in Britain, and this year’s open submission, judged alongside the work of current members, continues a run of annual exhibitions that has been interrupted only once, by the outbreak of the Second World War.

Figuration Against the Grain

In an art world where figuration has spent much of the past two decades justifying itself against conceptual and digital practice, the RSMA’s continued commitment to representational marine subjects — competitive sailing, working harbours, coastal wildlife, the “darkened waters of war” as one recent exhibition text put it — reads less as conservatism than as a specific, sustained proposition: that a narrow subject, worked with technical seriousness over generations, can still produce work of genuine range and quality. Subjects extend well beyond picturesque seascape into deep-water shipping, naval history and contemporary maritime life, with several members having been granted rare access to paint working Royal Navy vessels, including HMS Queen Elizabeth during its construction.

The Charles Pears Award

This year’s open call drew entries from marine artists working internationally, hung alongside the Society’s current membership, with prizes including the Charles Pears Award, given in memory of the RSMA’s founder and first president. The prize structure reflects a broader function the Society performs that is easy to overlook amid London’s fair-driven contemporary art calendar: it offers a functioning market and critical apparatus for artists working entirely outside gallery representation, judged by peers rather than curators or dealers.

An Island Nation’s Subject

Britain’s relationship to the sea — as an island nation whose history, trade and identity have long been shaped by it — gives the exhibition’s subject matter a resonance that occasionally exceeds its modest critical profile. Few reviewers cover the RSMA’s Annual Exhibition with the attention given to a Frieze booth or a Tate survey, yet the show reliably draws collectors and general visitors in numbers that many contemporary galleries would envy, evidence of an appetite for skilled figurative work that runs alongside, rather than in competition with, the contemporary mainstream.

Craft Over Concept

Running for eleven days at Mall Galleries, the exhibition offers a useful counterpoint to the conceptually driven programming dominating the capital’s October art calendar — a reminder that London’s art ecosystem still comfortably accommodates a society exhibition judged, first and foremost, on craft.

Website Mall Galleries