Well known established over many centuries and wandering in the culture of the archetypes associated with water. In the nineteenth century, which marked crisis of rationalism, we can distinguish archetype: water as the embodiment irrational. Accordingly, the antithesis of “rational-irrational” appears in literature and art through the contrast of images of earth and water. This binary reveals itself in the evolution of the leading art schools of romanticism and realism. Water, especially the sea, images prevail in romanticism, allow to realize its leading artistic and aesthetic ideas. Irrational element, the unpredictability embodied in the images of a stormy sea, the drama and the wrongness of fate – in the pictures of the shipwreck. Sea – infinity, the vastness of space, time, existence in General (J. Byron, U. Turner, T. Gericault, K. Friedrich, and others). In the era of establishing realistic, and then naturalism, with their interest in social existence of man, “water recedes”, giving place to land, the earth. In the image system, under the influence of materialistic tendencies and positivist cult of scientific knowledge, is dominated by the resistance, finiteness, definiteness. The earth is the center of matter, nature (E. Zola “Earth”). If the field of view of water falls, lush shimmering sea gives way to the calm water surface (“Barbizon painters”).