They love the sea, they love their companions, they love their girlfriends and their wives, and for a few hours they love the lovers they meet in the ports of the world. They are sailors, and one of them wrote on his own portrait, in the blue ink of a fountain pen, love you always.

From that promise, and through a selection of more than a hundred and twenty anonymous pictures, European and American, made between 1860 and 1960, this tells the story of one of the most compelling male figures — the only one, from Ulysses to our own day and by way of literature, cinema and fashion, to have won over both men and women; the only one to have crossed not just every ocean but that singular ocean of images and imaginings the medium itself created. Nobody asked of it more than the sailor did: that on that small paper lifeboat, love, friendship, adventure and home should hold.