It's very dynamic. It's incredibly difficult to capture it.

I don't think I'll do it justice, but I think that's what draws artists to water — and particularly to the coast.

It's endlessly changing, it's challenging, and there's always drama there.

Around the end of the 19th century, paintings like Ruby, Gold, and Malachite by Henry Scott Tuke, which featured young men bathing, became very popular.

They were thought to celebrate the great outdoors and encourage the taking of physical exercise in a time when industrialisation was moving people from the land to the cities.

These images also provided an excuse to celebrate the sensuality of the human body.

Paintings like Thomas Eakins' Swimming celebrate leisure, life, and sex.

But artists are also drawn to water's more sinister aspects.

John Millais' Ophelia, one of the most famous Pre-Raphaelite paintings, records the drowning of its subject in uncannily accurate detail.

And John Waterhouse's Hylas And The Nymphs has a naive but handsome Hylas being seduced to an early grave by a group of water nymphs — a scene that captures both the attraction and the danger of water.