Boris Ottenberg was born in Saint Petersburg and received an academic education. After the revolution, he moved to Estonia, leaving again in 1939 to settle in Sweden. The Sea is therefore one of the last works Ottenberg painted in Estonia. His compositions are often laconic: we see a single main motif (sea, forest, etc.) with few additional nuances. The Seaadds to the small corpus of Estonian seascapes, which, despite the country’s coastal location, is not particularly extensive—especially works depicting a pure view of the sea, where no shoreline or other defining elements are visible.

Ottenberg undertook a technically demanding task and executed it successfully: his academic training allowed him to depict the stormy sea surface, the reflections and white crests of the waves, the shifting water tones, and the drama unfolding in the sky. On Ottenberg’s canvas, the sea becomes a total elemental force, emphasized by the composition: he does not depict the stormy waters as a flat plane, but each successive band of waves rises above the previous one.