Page 173 - The Secret Museum

was the Blue Planet footage of its time.

The first black and white photographs of the ocean were being taken, and the first

films created, but Zarh’s paintings were the first of their kind – paintings created
under the sea. They brought secret images from the ocean floor up above the waves.
Moreover, he painted them for art’s sake, not for any other reason, just for the
pleasure of creation.

No wonder then that Albert, Prince of Monaco, snapped up some of Zarh’s
paintings for his museum. He bought two of the paintings now in storage from an
exhibition in Paris. The Illustrated London News wrote about the show in an article
printed on 21 January 1922. The piece has an illustration of Zarh ‘painting a picture

50 feet underwater’ and it tells how Prince Albert of Monaco, ‘whose interest in
oceanography is well known’, bought some paintings.

The article shows two of the paintings in black and white. It was a far richer
experience seeing them in the archive in full, dreamy colour. In both, orange fish
swim across the image. Zarh said he never painted if there were no small fishes
around, for ‘that is a sure sign of danger’: sharks must be nearby.

The painting I like best is of coral statues in the lagoon of Maraa, in Tahiti. Zarh
painted it while submerged in the lagoon, watching out for jellyfish. On 4 July 1925,
after Prince Albert’s death, Zarh was in Rio de Janeiro and decided to donate the
painting to his patron. He wrote on the back of the painting that it was a gift to Albert

I, from ‘a sincere admirer of his great character and work’. I like this one because it
was a gift to the museum and to its patron, and because it was created in Tahiti,
where Zarh won the life-changing bet.

In 1950, when Zarh was 85 years old, he lived in Austin, Texas, the neighbour of
Peggy Sparks and her two-year-old son. He would invite the two of them over for tea
and homemade cookies and show them his underwater paintings. Peggy recalls he
was particularly happy that his work had appeared in National Geographic and he
told her he had painted a scene for the Emperor of Japan’s aquarium.

The elderly artist had a great impact on Peggy, who later painted portraits,

restored paintings and took up underwater synchronized swimming.
Zarh even taught his neighbours how best to look at his paintings. Close one of
your eyes and with the other look through a hole made by your fist. If you do it right,

this will make it look as if the water in the undersea painting is moving. It worked for
Peggy. See if it works for you. I asked the art curator and she said, ‘It might… after a
couple of drinks!’