The Royal Society of Marine Artists’ (RSMA) Annual Exhibition celebrates its 80th anniversary this year. The society is a registered charity and has links to the RNLI, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and the Royal Navy.

The 2025 Annual Exhibition runs from 17 September at Mall Galleries in London, with over 450 original artworks by established contemporary marine artists and new talent from the RSMA’s open call. All works on display are available for purchase.

Srirangam Mohankumar

The Royal Society of Marine Artists

The society is a registered charity and has links to the RNLI, the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Navy. Its Annual Exhibition is considered the foremost UK exhibition of the Marine genre.

Works in the exhibition engage with all aspects of the sea. Previously, they have featured ships, landscapes, scenes from maritime trades, images and objects depicting marine wildlife, and mixed media works made with marine materials. They can reflect anything that happens on the water, beneath its surface, or in the communities and along the coastlines that surround it.

by Jamie Medlin

RSMA President John Scott Martin says, “Marine art has a special legacy in the UK as an island nation,” citing both Constable and Turner as influential and iconic names associated with the genre.

While the range of works within the Exhibition celebrate this long-standing tradition, they also reflect the complex nature of Britain’s seafaring history. Marine scenes and environments have been and still are places of leisure and contemplation, but also of labour, environmental harm, and exploitation.

Srirangam Mohankumar

“Over millennia, the seas have come to be regarded as a highway for trade colonisation, a source of food, a place of work, and in the struggle for power and dominance, as a field of conflict,” the RSMA explains.

Throughout its first eight decades, the society’s Annual Exhibitions have grappled with this complexity.

This year, to mark the occasion of its 80th Anniversary, the Annual Exhibition will place particular emphasis on the joy of leisure sailing and yachting. The theme represents the dream of leaving behind daily life on land and “setting sail” towards something quietly extraordinary.

RSMA President John Scott Martin comments, “Paintings of the sailing, the sea, and the marine environment provide a sense of escapist freedom many crave.”

Jamie Medlin

Displayed works will depict sailing as a symbol of freedom, adventure, and self-determination; collaboration, resilience, ingenuity, and humility before the raw power of natural elements.

“The eternal, ever-changing nature of the seas of the world have variously inspired wonder, awe, and fear since the dawn of civilisation,” the RSMA says, making them spaces to be enjoyed and protected, feared and respected in equal measure.

Deborah Walker RI

‘We, like so many people, are all of us mad about the sea,’ the RSMA says. ‘We stand spellbound by the shining water.’

Morning light [polruan16 x20 1795] by Jenny Aitken

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