Page 172 - The Secret Museum

in linseed and he stored his paints in a belt, each tube marked with a daub of its own

colour, because he realized that the water would soon wash away their labels. Narii
Salmon swam down to check on him at one point, wearing only a loincloth. He was
grinning and didn’t mind losing his bet. Zarh’s painting was beautiful, capturing the
twirling light of the sea.

Narii insisted on taking Zarh on as many trips as he wanted, showing him the reefs
of Tahiti, lending the artistic merman his diving suit. Zarh was thrilled by the silence
beneath the surface, watching creatures that had never seen a human before and
bringing them back to the surface for all to see. He would paint for half an hour, then

come up to get warm in the sunshine. He could leave his easel on the seafloor
overnight if he wanted to, as there are few currents in the coral reef of Tahiti.

Once each painting was complete, Zarh carried it to the surface and added a
powder to mimic the veil that covered everything he saw beneath the waves. He said,
‘It is a dream world in which everything is enveloped in soft sheen. On reaching the
bottom, it is as if one were temporarily resting on a dissolving fragment of some far
planet.’

When Zarh had completed a set of around 50 canvases, he held an exhibition in
San Francisco. They were all destroyed in a fire during the San Francisco earthquake

of 1906. Zarh painted more, and sold his work to royalty and ocean lovers all over
the world.

One admirer was Albert I of Monaco, who founded the Oceanographic Museum
which sits, like a temple to the sea, on the edge of a cliff, above the glittering
Mediterranean. Albert loved the ocean. He built the museum to celebrate the sea and
encourage marine exploration. He went on trips with scientists to the Azores and
Svalbard to collect species for his beloved museum, he drew up maps and he
explored. In its heyday, the museum was the place to be if you were a marine

scientist. Jacques Cousteau was director here for many years. It was he who took
down Zarh Pritchard’s paintings and put them in storage, when he modernized the
museum in the 1960s.

There they remain, above the office of the curator of art. She took me to see them.
We climbed up a staircase into a small attic room lined with paintings and pulled out
the five Pritchards. Each one had been created underwater, some in Tahiti, some in
the depths of a loch in Scotland.

The paintings have a smooth, dreamy, otherworldly feel to them. Like most
people, I’ve marvelled over the amazing BBC series Blue Planet, and I’ve also been
lucky enough to scuba dive with sharks, turtles and shimmering fish. Now we can all

buy goggles and masks in seaside shops and look for ourselves at the ocean. But
during Zarh’s lifetime, this was all still to come. When he started painting, what lay
beneath the surface of the ocean was a mystery. Prince Albert I collected his pictures
because they were pioneering studies of the world beneath the waves. At the time,
very few people had seen the colours and corals beneath the ocean first hand. This