Wrecks, Storms and Rescue
The raft of the Medusa, and the speck of a ship on the horizon. The ship crushed in Friedrich’s Sea of Ice. Turner’s Slave Ship, Homer’s Gulf Stream, Grace Darling rowing out to the Forfarshire. The pictures painters made when the sea won, and when people refused to let it.
This chapter of Ships in Paintings holds 74 works. For each one you will find the artist and, wherever the records allow, the date and where the original is kept; then what the ship brings to the picture, and the real ship behind it when there is one. See all 1,331 works on one page.
Marea can build any of these ships as a scale model, with the maximum detail the scale permits, finished to be inspected. We can build her as the artist saw her: the same rig, the same sails set, the same colours. It isn’t a copy of a painting. It’s the ship, stepping out of it.
This database was put together by Ai Refloat™, Marea’s own artificial intelligence, from the records of museums, maritime archives and published sources. Ai Refloat is still young & like any teenager, it can be a little volatile and unpredictable at times, but above all, it is learning fast. So this list may well contain mistakes and we welcome the input of everyone who knows these paintings, photographs and ships better than we do: listening, correcting and learning is one of the many ways we work towards perfection in this craft.
When no free image of a work exists, we show instead the museum or the place where the original can be seen.
Have you spotted a mistake? Tell us which painting, photograph or ship, and we will amend it accordingly. Tell us here
The works
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Print
HMS Association, with Eagle, Romney and Firebrand Named ship
Sir Cloudesly Shovel in the Association with the Eagle, Rumney and the Firebrand, Lost on the Rocks of Scilly, October 22, 1707, c. 1710
Artist Unknown engraver
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (PAH0710)
Medium Engraving and etching
This modest print is the only contemporary illustration of one of the worst disasters in the history of the Royal Navy. Returning from the Mediterranean in autumn 1707, Sir Cloudesley Shovell's squadron had been unable to take navigational sights for days and believed itself further south than it was. On the night of 22 October his flagship Association, shown here flying the royal standard in the left foreground, ran onto the Gilstone Ledges of Scilly and rapidly sank; the Eagle, Firebrand and Romney struck nearby. Over 1,300 men were lost, Shovell among them, and his body was later buried in Westminster Abbey.
“the only contemporary illustration of the disaster”
The real ship HMS Association, a 90-gun second-rate launched at Portsmouth in 1697, was Shovell's flagship in the Mediterranean, at the capture of Gibraltar in 1704 and at Toulon in 1707. She struck the Gilstone Ledges off Scilly on the night of 22 October 1707 and sank; only 26 men from the lost ships were reported to have survived.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, where the original is kept. Photo: TxllxT, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
East Indiamen in a storm Unnamed
East Indiamen Driven Ashore in a Storm, 18th century
Artist Charles Brooking (c. 1723 to 1759)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (BHC1026)
Medium Oil on canvas
Most of Brooking's surviving paintings date from the last six years of his short career, and by 1755 his reputation as a marine painter was well established. Here, from a low viewpoint, East Indiamen ride out huge dark waves in the middle ground while lightning streaks between the clouds and a castle stands on the cliffs to the right. The debt to Willem van de Velde the Younger and Simon de Vlieger is clear, yet the museum finds his approach mostly his own and praises his careful detail. A storm like this satisfied the eighteenth-century appetite for the sublime.
“an informed knowledge of maritime practice and naval architecture”
The vessels Unnamed ships of the East India Company; the painting does not record a particular wreck.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Image: Charles Brooking, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Two royal yachts Unnamed
Royal Yachts in a Storm, 18th century
Artist Charles Brooking (c. 1723 to 1759)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (BHC1024)
Medium Oil on canvas
Even the sovereign's yachts are at the mercy of the weather here. Brooking sets two royal yachts among other vessels riding out a storm, seen from a low viewpoint, with rays of lightning between the clouds and a dramatic light falling on water and sails. The museum sees a strong resemblance to Van de Velde's storms and the influence of De Vlieger, yet judges his approach mostly individual, and notes his careful attention to detail. By 1755 his reputation as a marine painter was well established, and this small canvas shows why: the drama never obscures his understanding of ships.
“His careful attention to detail demonstrates an informed knowledge of maritime practice and naval architecture.”
The vessels Two unnamed royal yachts; the individual vessels are not identified.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Image: Charles Brooking, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Merchant ship wrecked on a rocky coast Unnamed
A Storm and a Shipwreck (Tempête et naufrage d'un vaisseau), 1754
Artist Joseph Vernet (1714 to 1789)
Where to see it Wallace Collection, London (P135)
Medium Oil on canvas
Commissioned by the Marquis de Marigny, brother of Madame de Pompadour, and painted while Vernet was living in Marseille between 1753 and 1754, this storm was shown at the Salon of 1755. A ship breaks up on a rugged coast in a fierce storm, and the scene carries the theme the Wallace Collection sees at the heart of Vernet's wrecks: human helplessness before nature. Marigny ordered a calm pendant to answer it, for Vernet liked to set storm against serenity. The Marquess of Hertford acquired it in 1869.
“one of Vernet's masterworks after his move from Rome to France”
The vessels An unnamed sailing ship on a rocky coast; no particular vessel or wreck is identified.
Sources wallacelive.wallacecollection.org · Wikipedia
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Maltese brigantine driven ashore at Sète Unnamed
View of the Port of Sète (Vue du port de Cette, en Languedoc), 1757
Artist Joseph Vernet (1714 to 1789)
Where to see it Musée du Louvre, Paris (on deposit at the Musée national de la Marine, Paris since 1943)
Medium Oil on canvas
Vernet painted Sète from the sea under a stormy sky that fills two thirds of the canvas, dark clouds broken by patches of blue that reveal the town and port in golden light. In the foreground two vessels face the weather. The one on the left has passed the jetty; the other, a Maltese brigantine, is caught by the wind and is going aground on the sand. Vernet details the crew's work: a group lowering the mainsail, two at the helm, one watching at the bow, all apparently directed by a man with a speaking trumpet. The canvas was shown at the Salon of 1757.
The vessels A brigantine from Malta, a two-masted merchant vessel, shown running aground outside the port of Sète.
Sources Wikipedia (FR) · Wikipedia
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Ship wrecked in a lightning storm Unnamed
The Shipwreck, 1772
Artist Joseph Vernet (1714 to 1789)
Where to see it National Gallery of Art, Washington
Medium Oil on canvas
Signed and dated 1772, and commissioned by Lord Arundell of Wardour for Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, this canvas was meant to stir the sublime, that mix of terror, awe and delight. A ship is being wrecked on a rocky coast, and crew and passengers try to save themselves by climbing down a rope from the mast to the shore. Wind, waves and a jagged bolt of lightning dwarf them. Vernet gave it a partner, Moonlight, and half a century later his grandson Horace borrowed from it for his homage to the old painter tied to a mast.
“The small, frantic figures are overwhelmed by the violence of nature”
The vessels An unnamed sailing ship on a rocky coast; no particular vessel or wreck is identified.
Sources National Gallery of Art · Wikipedia
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Two ships in a storm and the remains of a third wrecked on the rocks Unnamed
A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas (Tempête), 1773
Artist Joseph Vernet (1714 to 1789)
Where to see it National Gallery, London (NG6601)
Medium Oil on canvas
Commissioned on behalf of the King of Poland, then sold by Vernet to Clive of India in 1773, this storm was painted as Tempête, the partner of a calm scene now called A Landscape at Sunset. Two ships roll in a giant swell with sails tied down or torn, lightning streaks from the clouds, and the remains of a third lie shattered on the rocks. On the shore figures carry salvaged goods, and friends despair over an unconscious woman. Yet further down the coast the clouds break and sunlight returns, and that promise of calm gives the tempest its meaning.
“the only great pair of marine views by Vernet in a British public collection”
The vessels Unnamed sailing ships; the painting depicts an imagined storm on a rocky coast rather than a recorded wreck.
Sources National Gallery
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Ship's boat in Havana harbour Unnamed
Watson and the Shark, 1778
Artist John Singleton Copley (1738 to 1815)
Where to see it National Gallery of Art, Washington; full-size replica at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; smaller version at the Detroit Institute of Arts
Medium Oil on canvas
In 1749 Brook Watson, a fourteen-year-old cabin boy, was attacked by a shark in the harbour of Havana; he lost his right leg below the knee and was only rescued at the third attempt, the moment Copley chose to paint. Watson himself commissioned the picture a quarter of a century later, and it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1778. The small boat is the whole stage: the boy in the water, the shark closing, the crew leaning out to reach him. Watson went on to become Lord Mayor of London, and left the painting to Christ's Hospital as a lesson to youth.
“Horror and panic grip Watson, who has already lost part of his right leg to the shark.”
The vessels An open boat from a ship lying in Havana harbour, where Watson was serving as a cabin boy. Such boats carried men and stores between ship and shore.
Sources National Gallery of Art · Wikipedia
Image: John Singleton Copley, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
HMS Gloucester Named ship
The Wreck of the Gloucester off Yarmouth, 6 May 1682, late 18th century
Artist Attributed to Monamy Swaine
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Caird Collection (BHC3370)
Medium Oil on panel
The Gloucester was carrying James, Duke of York, the future James II, to Leith when she ran aground on the Lemon and Oar sandbank off Yarmouth with the loss of a hundred and thirty lives. The painting shows her listing to port, sails and rigging flapping in the wind and her stern lashed by huge waves, while figures pour off her side onto dry land and a boat full of passengers pulls away from her bows. The naval historian W. Laird Clowes suggested the wreck might have been a deliberate attempt on the Duke's life. The ship itself may derive from a picture by Van de Velde.
The real ship Built under contract by the shipwright Matthew Graves at Limehouse and launched in 1654 for the Commonwealth navy, the Gloucester passed to the Royal Navy at the Restoration. She was wrecked off Great Yarmouth on 6 May 1682 while carrying the Duke of York to Scotland.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Image: Attributed to Monamy Swaine, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Grosvenor (East Indiaman) Named ship
The Wreck of the Grosvenor 1782
Artist George Carter (1737 to 1794)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (PAH8397)
Medium Gouache
Carter shows the homeward-bound Indiaman already broken in two on the reef, only her head and stern above water, while desperate sailors cling to a rope strung from her stern to a rocky promontory and the ensign still whips in the wind. The loss gripped Britain because the wreck was only the beginning: 123 of the 138 aboard reached land, but only 19 survived the barren country and the hostile encounters that followed. Jagged clouds and a turbulent sea make this the moment before that long ordeal, when reaching the shore still looked like rescue.
The real ship The Grosvenor, a three-masted East Indiaman of 729 tons under Captain John Coxon, sailed for England from Trincomalee in June 1782 and was wrecked on a reef on the Pondoland coast of South Africa on 4 August 1782. Most of the survivors set out to walk to the Cape, a distance far greater than Coxon believed, and very few reached it.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Print
Grosvenor (East Indiaman) Named ship
The Grosvenor East Indiaman, Capt Coxon commander, wrecked Augst 4th 1782, 1784
Artist Robert Smirke (1753 to 1845), engraved by Robert Pollard and Francis Jukes
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (PAH8443)
Medium Aquatint and etching
Published on 8 March 1784, less than two years after the wreck, this large aquatint after Robert Smirke carried the Grosvenor's loss into British homes. Its long title reads like a headline, naming the ship, her commander Captain Coxon, the date and the African coast where she struck, so that the print serves as news as much as art. The disaster lay in what followed: 123 people reached land, but only a handful survived the attempt to walk to safety. Here the ship is remembered at the moment she was lost, before that long ordeal began.
The real ship The Grosvenor, a three-masted East Indiaman of 729 tons under Captain John Coxon, was wrecked on the Pondoland coast of South Africa on 4 August 1782 on her homeward voyage from India; most of the survivors died attempting to walk to the Cape.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Print
Halsewell (East Indiaman) Named ship
The wreck of the Halsewell, c. 1786
Artist Thomas Stothard (1755 to 1834), engraved by Edmund Scott
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (PAH0504)
Medium Mezzotint, coloured
Stothard takes us below decks, into the roundhouse, the passenger saloon under the poop of the stranded Indiaman, in the early hours of 6 January 1786. Captain Richard Pierce sits between his two daughters, comforting them, while the second and third mates, Henry Meriton and John Rogers, stand on the point of leaving. The scene came from the narrative those two officers published fifteen days after the wreck, and Meriton advised the artist directly. None of the women aboard escaped, and Pierce stayed with them. It is a shipwreck without a wave in sight, and all the more affecting for it.
The real ship The Halsewell, an East Indiaman launched in 1778, was outward bound when a storm drove her ashore at 2 am on 6 January 1786 against the cliffs at Seacombe in Dorset; she disintegrated within two hours and about 170 people were lost, among them the captain and all the women aboard.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Image: Thomas Stothard, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Print
HMS Guardian Named ship
The Guardian frigate, commanded by Lieutenant Riou, surrounded by Islands of Ice in the South Seas, on which she struck, 24th December 1789, in her passage to Botany Bay, with the departure of the Crew in the Jolly Boat, 1790
Artist Carington Bowles (publisher)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (PAF7976)
Medium Mezzotint
The Guardian was carrying stores, livestock, plants and convicts to the struggling new colony at Botany Bay when, on Christmas Eve 1789, she closed an iceberg to take on fresh water and struck a submerged spur of ice that tore away her rudder and part of her keel. Most of her people took to the boats, but Lieutenant Edward Riou stayed with the sinking ship and by the following February had brought her to Table Bay. The mezzotint shows the jolly boat leaving: a sailor with an axe ready to cut her free, another at prayer, icicles hanging from the rigging and ice poised above the deck.
“I have determined to remain in the ship, and shall endeavour to make my presence useful”
The real ship A 44-gun Roebuck-class two-decker fifth-rate built by Robert Batson at Limehouse and launched on 23 March 1784, the Guardian was fitted out in 1789 as a store ship and convict transport for New South Wales. After the iceberg collision Riou brought her waterlogged into Table Bay; a gale on 12 April 1790 drove her ashore, and the wreck was sold in 1791.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Image: Carington Bowles, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
HMS Ramillies Named ship
Loss of HMS Ramillies, September 1782: on her beam ends, late 18th to early 19th century
Artist Robert Dodd (1748 to 1815)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (BHC2213)
Medium Oil on canvas
Dodd told the loss of the Ramillies in more than one canvas; this one shows the ship on her beam ends, and a companion, dated 1785, shows her crew taking to the boats. She was sailing with Admiral Thomas Graves's fleet from Jamaica towards England when the great hurricane of September 1782 caught it off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Several warships foundered in that storm; the Ramillies was abandoned and scuttled. Lying over on her side in a mountainous sea, she becomes an image of how quickly a ship of the line could be made helpless.
The real ship A 74-gun third-rate built at Chatham Dockyard and launched on 15 April 1763, the Ramillies served in the American War of Independence, chiefly escorting convoys. Caught by the Central Atlantic hurricane of September 1782 while sailing with Graves's fleet, she was abandoned and scuttled on 21 September 1782.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
A troop transport, linked with the loss of HMS Minotaur Unnamed
The Wreck of a Transport Ship, 1810
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon
Medium Oil on canvas
A ship lies overwhelmed at the height of a fearsome storm while boats try to pick up survivors around her. Turner had been making preparatory sketches before any single disaster, so the picture was not conceived as a portrait of one wreck, but the loss of HMS Minotaur off the Dutch coast with heavy loss of life in 1810 gave it a terrible topicality. Storms and wrecks were a recurring Romantic theme, and Turner returned to them in Calais Pier, The Shipwreck and later The Slave Ship. The canvas has been in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon since 1920.
The vessels HMS Minotaur, a 74-gun third-rate launched at Woolwich on 6 November 1793, fought at the Nile, Trafalgar and Copenhagen before she was wrecked, with heavy loss of life, in December 1810.
Sources Wikipedia
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Print
HMS St George and HMS Defence Named ship
A View of the Shipwreck and Total Loss of the St George and the Defence in the North Sea (with key), 1812
Artist George Thompson
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (PAH0746)
Medium Etching, hand-coloured
Published on 4 March 1812, barely ten weeks after the event, this hand-coloured etching with its key told Britain how two ships of the line had been lost on the coast of Jutland. Escorting a Baltic convoy home, the storm damaged St George, which had carried Nelson's flag to Copenhagen, took the ground on the outermost sandbar near Thorsminde at six in the morning on Christmas Eve 1811, some 500 metres from land, and the Defence was wrecked close by. Over the following fortnight nearly 1,400 drowned men washed up on the beach, among them Rear Admiral Reynolds; the dunes where they were buried are still called Dead Men's Dunes.
The real ship HMS St George, a 98-gun second-rate launched at Portsmouth on 14 October 1785, carried Nelson's flag at Copenhagen in 1801 until he shifted to the Elephant. Returning from the Baltic as flagship of Rear Admiral Reynolds, she grounded near Thorsminde on 24 December 1811; HMS Defence was lost close by, and almost all the men of both ships died.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Image: George Thompson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Drawing
Halsewell (East Indiaman) Named ship
The Loss of an East Indiaman, c. 1818
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it The Higgins, Bedford
Medium Watercolour
Painted for Turner's close friend and patron Walter Fawkes of Farnley Hall, and exhibited at Fawkes's London home in April 1819, this watercolour is thought by Eric Shanes to show the Halsewell, lost off Dorset in January 1786, a wreck Turner referred to in a manuscript poem from his 1811 West Country tour. Instead of a panorama of sea, the rolling deck fills the frame with scores of clinging and scrambling figures, so that the storm is felt through the people aboard. Andrew Wilton counted it among Turner's most interesting experiments in portraying the horror of a sea storm.
“it concentrates on the plight of the ship's crew almost to the exclusion of the sea itself”
The real ship The Halsewell was an East Indiaman launched in 1778, recorded as 758 tons burthen. Bound for Bengal, she was driven onto the rocks below a cliff near Seacombe on the Isle of Purbeck in a snowstorm on 6 January 1786 and dashed to pieces in less than an hour; there were only 74 survivors.
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Higgins, Bedford, where the original is kept. Photo: M J Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Raft of the frigate Méduse, with a rescue ship on the horizon Named ship
The Raft of the Medusa (Le Radeau de la Méduse), 1818 to 1819
Artist Théodore Géricault (1791 to 1824)
Where to see it Musée du Louvre, Paris (INV 4884)
Medium Oil on canvas
The ship itself is gone: what Géricault gives us is the raft built after the wreck of the frigate Méduse, and on the horizon the ship that will rescue the last survivors. He interviewed two survivors and built a scale model of the raft, and he built the composition as a pyramid, from the dead in the foreground to the central figure waving desperately at the distant sail. Shown at the Salon of 1819 as Shipwreck Scene, it caused passionate praise and condemnation, turned a naval scandal into a national reckoning, and was acquired by the Louvre soon after the artist's death.
The real ship The Méduse was a 40-gun Pallas-class frigate launched in 1810. Armed en flûte to carry French officials to Senegal, she ran aground off the coast of present-day Mauritania on 2 July 1816; on 5 July at least 150 people were set adrift on a raft, and all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue.
Image: Théodore Géricault, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Drawing
Raft of the Méduse and the rescuers of the brig Argus Named ship
The Rescue of the Survivors of the Raft of the Medusa, c. 1818
Artist Théodore Géricault (1791 to 1824)
Where to see it Art Institute of Chicago (1973.721)
Medium Pen and brown ink over traces of graphite on tan wove paper
Géricault struggled to choose a single moment for his great painting. Among the scenes he considered were the mutiny, the cannibalism and, as in this pen drawing, the rescue itself. In the end he painted something harder to bear: the survivors sighting the Argus on the horizon as she sails past without seeing them. This sheet, once owned by the collector Pierre Dubaut, lets us see the road not taken, and how much the finished canvas gains by leaving rescue out of reach.
“From the delirium of joy, we fell into profound despondency and grief.”
The real ship The Méduse, a French frigate, ran aground on the Bank of Arguin in July 1816. Her raft drifted for thirteen days until the brig Argus found it on 17 July with only fifteen men still alive.
Sources Art Institute of Chicago · Wikipedia
Image: Théodore Géricault, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Print
Raft of the frigate Méduse Named ship
Shipwreck of the Frigate Medusa. Revolt of Some of the Crew on the Raft, 1818
Artist Hippolyte Lecomte (1781 to 1857), printed by Comte Charles-Philibert de Lasteyrie
Where to see it Art Institute of Chicago (1961.355)
Medium Lithograph in black on cream wove paper
Before Géricault's canvas there were prints. This lithograph, printed in 1818 by the Comte de Lasteyrie, takes as its subject the revolt of part of the crew on the raft, the darkest episode of an ordeal that lasted thirteen days. It appeared while the scandal of the Méduse was still raw in France, the year before Géricault showed his great painting at the Salon of 1819. Where Géricault would choose the moment of hope, the sighting of the rescue ship, this print dwells on the moment when the men on the raft turned on one another.
The real ship The Méduse, a 40-gun Pallas-class frigate launched at Paimboeuf in 1810, ran aground on the Bank of Arguin off West Africa in July 1816. At least 146 men and one woman were put on a hastily built raft; after thirteen days of mutiny, starvation and killing, the brig Argus found it on 17 July with only 15 men still alive.
Sources Art Institute of Chicago · Wikipedia
Image: Hippolyte Lecomte, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Dutton (East Indiaman) Named ship
The Wreck of the East Indiaman Dutton in Plymouth Sound, 26 January 1796, 1821
Artist Thomas Luny (1759 to 1837)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (BHC3298)
Medium Oil on canvas
The Dutton, carrying troops for the West Indies, was wrecked in Plymouth Sound in a gale, and it was Sir Edward Pellew, a powerful man, who swam out with a line so that breeches buoys could be rigged; all but four of the 600 aboard were saved. Luny, following a print by Nicholas Pocock, shows the dismasted ship close inshore, rescue lines held taut by an organised crowd, figures in transit along them, and an officer in blue on the poop who is probably Pellew himself. Signed and dated 1821, this large version was sold in 1834 to Pellew's son Fleetwood.
The real ship Built on the Thames in 1781 and chartered by the East India Company, the Dutton was carrying troops to the West Indies when she was wrecked in Plymouth Sound in a gale on 26 January 1796; all but four of the 600 aboard were saved.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Wrecked ship in the Arctic ice Unnamed
The Sea of Ice (Das Eismeer), 1823 to 1824
Artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774 to 1840)
Where to see it Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Medium Oil on canvas
Friedrich piles slabs of ice into a great jagged altar, and only slowly do we notice the wrecked ship half-buried on the right. He probably knew of William Edward Parry's expedition of 1819 to 1820 in search of the North-West Passage, and in the winter of 1820 to 1821 he made oil studies of ice floes on the Elbe near Dresden. The picture was met with incomprehension, was still unsold when he died, and was at times confused with his lost Wreck of Hope. Today it is counted among his masterpieces. The ship is tiny, almost an afterthought, and that is the terror of it.
“He has understood completely how to represent in landscape the great struggles of nature.”
The vessels The ship is unnamed. Friedrich is thought to have drawn on accounts of Parry's 1819 to 1820 Arctic expedition, which sailed in search of the North-West Passage.
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Kent (East Indiaman) Named ship
Loss of the East Indiaman Kent, 1 March 1825: catching fire, 1826
Artist Thomas Luny (1759 to 1837)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (BHC2272)
Medium Oil on canvas
One of a pair of paintings by Luny of the same disaster, signed and dated 1826, this canvas shows the moment the Kent caught fire. She was on her third voyage to Bengal and China, carrying some 700 people, mainly soldiers of the 31st Regiment and their families, when after two days of storms in the Bay of Biscay a naked light in the hold, reportedly carried by men trying to steal liquor, set her alight. The crew flooded the hold, then had to shut the ports again for fear she would sink. Rescue came only when a sailor aloft sighted another vessel.
“a number of those saved from the ‘Kent’ perished during the journey, including a substantial number of children.”
The real ship The Kent, owned by Stewart Marjoribanks and in East India Company service from 1820, made two voyages for the Company before her loss. Commanded by Henry Cobb, she caught fire on 1 March 1825; boats ferried most of her people to the brig Cambrian, bound for Vera Cruz, which carried them to Falmouth.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Musée national de la Marine
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Kent (East Indiaman) Named ship
The Burning of the Kent (Incendie du Kent, 1825), 1828
Artist Théodore Gudin (1802 to 1880)
Where to see it Musée national de la Marine, Paris (9 OA 34 D, deposit of the Louvre)
Medium Oil on canvas
Gudin was only twenty-six when this huge canvas, more than four metres wide, won him immediate success at the Salon of 1828. The Kent, carrying more than 650 people, about a hundred of them women and children, is ablaze in a Bay of Biscay gale, the fire threatening her powder room, while the English brig Cambria, drawn by her distress flag, tries to take off her people. Smoke merges with storm cloud, the waves are laid on so thickly they seem almost transparent, and the survivors crowd the foreground in panic. The museum calls it a frightful spectacle.
“un spectacle effroyable”
The real ship The Kent entered East India Company service in 1820 and, under Captain Henry Cobb, sailed in February 1825 for Bengal and China with some 700 people aboard, mainly soldiers of the 31st Regiment and their families. She caught fire in the Bay of Biscay after two days of storms; most of those aboard were ferried by boat to the brig Cambrian (Cambria in French sources), which landed them at Falmouth.
Sources Musée national de la Marine · Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Julia and Colombus Named ship
An Act of Devotion by Captain Desse of Bordeaux towards the Colombus, a Dutch Ship (Trait de dévouement du capitaine Desse, de Bordeaux, envers Le Colombus, navire hollandais), 1829
Artist Théodore Gudin (1802 to 1880)
Where to see it Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux
Medium Oil on canvas
In July 1822 the Dutch ship Colombus, bound from Batavia to Amsterdam with coffee, sugar and a detachment of soldiers, was dismasted and left rudderless by a gale on the Agulhas Bank. On 23 July the Bordeaux brig Julia found her. Though damaged herself, Captain Pierre Desse stood by for days, speaking to the wreck through a speaking trumpet and keeping in touch by her lights at night, until on 28 July he could take all 92 people aboard his small brig. Gudin's canvas was commissioned in 1828, shown at the Salon of 1831 and has hung in the Bordeaux museum since 1832.
“Je ne vous abandonnerai pas !”
The real ship The Colombus was a Dutch square-rigged three-master of 800 tonneaux owned by Devries and Co. of Amsterdam, sailing from Batavia on 19 May 1822 under Captain Grevelink; she was abandoned with her cargo after the rescue. The Julia was a French brig of 200 tonneaux from Bordeaux commanded by Pierre Desse.
Sources Wikipedia (FR) · Wikipedia
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Stranded vessel, lifeboat and Manby rescue party Unnamed
Life-Boat and Manby Apparatus Going Off to a Stranded Vessel Making Signal (Blue Lights) of Distress, c. 1831
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Victoria and Albert Museum, London (FA.211)
Medium Oil on canvas
Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1831, the year Captain George Manby became a Fellow of the Royal Society, this is Turner celebrating modern rescue. Manby's apparatus fired a rope from a mortar on the shore to a stranded ship, and he developed it after witnessing a disastrous wreck at Great Yarmouth in 1807. Turner's long title names every actor: the lifeboat, the apparatus, the vessel and her blue distress lights. Catalogued for years as Vessel in Distress off Yarmouth, it was probably painted for, or bought by, the architect John Nash, and a critic of 1831 found it warm and full of life.
“a magnificent picture, warm and all life”
The vessels An unnamed vessel stranded off the Norfolk coast near Yarmouth. The Manby apparatus, devised by George Manby (1765 to 1854), sent a line from shore to a wreck so that people could be brought off.
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
John S. Spence (schooner, lost 1827) and the rescuing brig Cobosse Contee Named ship
Loss of the Schooner 'John S. Spence' of Norfolk, Virginia, 2d View: Rescue of the Survivors, 1833
Artist Thomas Birch (1779 to 1851)
Where to see it Los Angeles County Museum of Art (M.86.308.2)
Medium Oil on canvas
Unlike many of Birch's stormy marines, this one happened. On 19 August 1827 the schooner John S. Spence sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, for Havana; six days later she was wrecked in a storm on the open sea, her bowsprit and taffrail broken and her masts turned into a confusion of ropes and broken wood. A week after the wreck Captain Isaac Staples of the brig Cobosse Contee rescued five survivors, only three of whom lived to reach New York. One of them, Alexander M. Peltz, nineteen at the time, commissioned this painting, meaning it for his rescuer; Staples was lost at sea before it was finished.
The real ship John S. Spence was a schooner of Norfolk, Virginia, lost on the open sea in August 1827 on passage to Havana; the survivors were rescued by the brig Cobosse Contee under the New England captain Isaac Staples.
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Dismasted sailing ship driven onto a rocky coast Unnamed
Shipwreck near a Rocky Coast, 1833
Artist Thomas Birch (1779 to 1851)
Where to see it Art Institute of Chicago (2018.363)
Medium Oil on canvas
Thomas Birch, based in Philadelphia, was a leading marine painter who helped establish the genre in early nineteenth-century America. This romantic, imagined scene sets human struggle against the forces of nature: the ship's sails are torn, her masts lean to one side, and a tiny group of seafarers tries to flee the disaster. As the Art Institute observes, Birch painted it in dramatic detail yet never tells us how it ends, and the viewer is left suspended between hope and loss.
“Birch rendered the scene in dramatic detail, yet left the narrative unresolved.”
The vessels The ship is imaginary, a sailing ship of the period rather than a portrait of a named vessel.
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Amphitrite (convict ship) Named ship
A Disaster at Sea, c. 1835
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Tate, London (N00558)
Medium Oil on canvas
Never exhibited in Turner's lifetime and probably left unfinished, this canvas came to the nation with the Turner Bequest in 1856. It is generally held to have been inspired by the loss of the Amphitrite off Boulogne in August 1833, a ship carrying women convicts and their children to New South Wales, whose master refused help from the shore for fear his prisoners would escape. Turner had seen Géricault's Raft of the Medusa in London, and the picture draws on it in both style and theme: human beings left to the mercy of the sea.
The real ship The Amphitrite was built at Appledore in Devon, launched in 1802 and lengthened in 1824. Under Captain John Hunter she sailed from Woolwich on 25 August 1833 with 108 female convicts and 12 children, was driven ashore in a gale off Boulogne on 31 August and broke up with the loss of 133 lives; only three crewmen survived.
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Forfarshire and the Darlings' coble Named ship
William and Grace Darling Going to the Rescue of the SS Forfarshire, c. 1838
Artist Henry Perlee Parker (1795 to 1873) and John Wilson Carmichael (1799 to 1868)
Where to see it RNLI Grace Darling Museum, Bamburgh (RNLI:GD.2002.478)
Medium Oil on canvas
When the wreck of the Forfarshire became a national sensation, Parker saw his chance and enlisted his friend Carmichael, a marine specialist. They paid four fishermen to row them out to the Longstone lighthouse: Carmichael went on beyond it to sketch the wreckage, while Parker stayed most of a week making studies and portraits of the Darlings. The result shows father and daughter setting out in their coble towards the wreck. Engraved in mezzotint and published on the first anniversary of the rescue, it helped make Parker one of the best-known artists of the north-east.
The real ship The paddle steamer Forfarshire struck Big Harcar in the Farne Islands in the early hours of 7 September 1838 and broke in two almost at once. William and Grace Darling rowed their 21-foot Northumberland coble from the Longstone lighthouse and took off survivors from the bow section; in all eight crew and one passenger were saved.
Image: Henry Perlee Parker, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
HDMS Galathea Named ship
The Corvette Galathea in a Storm in the North Sea, 1839
Artist C. W. Eckersberg (1783 to 1853)
Where to see it Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (KMS1116)
Medium Oil on canvas
The painter was himself aboard. Crossing the North Sea in the corvette Galathea, Eckersberg lived through a severe storm on 12 May 1839 and recorded it in his diary; when he finished the painting he even called the ship a frigate there by mistake. The Galathea heels under a few small storm sails, her yards almost bare, over a steep green sea streaked with foam, while the clouds begin to break into blue. It is a sailor's picture as much as a painter's, made by a man who had just felt that motion under his feet.
The real ship Built at the naval dockyard at Gammelholm, Copenhagen, to designs by Andreas Schifter and launched on 6 October 1831, the Galathea was a three-masted corvette that made the first Galathea Expedition around the world in 1845 to 1847. Sold in 1862, she later sailed as a merchant ship and was wrecked at Oran, Algeria, on 11 May 1889.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: C. W. Eckersberg, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Print
Lexington (steamboat) Named ship
Awful Conflagration of the Steam Boat Lexington in Long Island Sound on Monday Eve, January 13th, 1840, by which melancholy occurrence, over 100 Persons Perished, 1840
Artist Nathaniel Currier (1813 to 1888), after William Keesey Hewitt (1817 to 1893)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (63.550.345(1))
Medium Hand-coloured lithograph
As the story goes, Currier was in the offices of the New York Sun when news of the Lexington reached the paper; W. K. Hewitt was commissioned to draw the scene, and the print appeared in record time as a news extra. Minute figures crowd the burning decks, some hurling themselves into the icy water, while in the foreground people float on cotton bales, the very cargo that fed the fire, some calling for help and some helping others. The print secured Currier's national fame and pointed the way for the firm later known as Currier and Ives.
“It propelled him to national prominence.”
The real ship The Lexington, a 205-foot steamboat commissioned by Cornelius Vanderbilt and launched about five years before her loss, left New York for Stonington on 13 January 1840 with passengers and a cargo of cotton bales. Fire broke out near her overheated stacks; of about 140 people aboard, only four survived.
Sources The Met · journalpanorama.org
Image: Nathaniel Currier, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
HMS Royal George Named ship
Loss of the Royal George, 1840
Artist John Christian Schetky (1778 to 1874)
Where to see it Tate Britain, London
Medium Oil on canvas
Schetky showed this large canvas at the Royal Academy in 1840, almost sixty years after the event, and it was given to the nation in 1885. The Royal George, once Hawke's flagship at Quiberon Bay, lay at Spithead in August 1782 with hundreds of visitors aboard when she was heeled over for work on her hull; water poured in through her lower gunports and she filled and sank. Rear Admiral Kempenfelt, writing in his cabin, was trapped when the doors jammed. William Cowper's lines turned the loss into a national elegy.
“Toll for the brave / The brave that are no more, / All sunk beneath the wave, / Fast by their native shore.”
The real ship A 100-gun first-rate built at Woolwich Dockyard and launched on 18 February 1756, the largest warship in the world at the time, the Royal George was Hawke's flagship at Quiberon Bay in 1759. On 29 August 1782 she capsized and sank at Spithead while heeled for hull work, taking about 900 people with her, including many women and children visiting the ship; 255 were saved.
Sources Wikipedia
Image: John Christian Schetky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Ship's boat from Byron's Don Juan Myth and legend
The Shipwreck of Don Juan (Le Naufrage de Don Juan), 1840
Artist Eugène Delacroix (1798 to 1863)
Where to see it Musée du Louvre, Paris
Medium Oil on canvas
Delacroix takes his wreck from the second canto of Byron's Don Juan: the hero and his companions, adrift on the Mediterranean in a ship's boat after the wreck, have run out of food and draw lots to decide who will be sacrificed to feed the rest. As a student Delacroix had posed as one of the models for Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, and here the raft becomes a small open boat, with the same hunger and despair. The picture was shown at the Salon of 1841 and acquired by the Louvre in 1883; a much earlier sketch of the subject is at the V&A.
The legend A fictional ship from Byron's poem Don Juan; the painting shows only her boat, adrift with the survivors after the wreck.
Sources Wikipedia · eclecticlight.co
Image: Eugène Delacroix, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
A British slaver, after the Zong Unnamed
Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840
Artist J. M. W. Turner (1775 to 1851)
Where to see it Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (99.22)
Medium Oil on canvas
Turner showed this at the Royal Academy in 1840, the year the abolitionist campaigns were at their height, and he was possibly moved to paint it by Thomas Clarkson's history of the slave trade, which tells of the Zong: in 1781 her captain had 132 enslaved Africans thrown overboard as drinking water ran low so that the insurance could be claimed. The ship sails away through a tumultuous sea, leaving human forms floating in her wake. John Ruskin, given the painting by his father in 1844, praised it above all Turner's work; Mark Twain mocked it. Its force lies in that divide.
“If I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon any single work, I should choose this.”
The vessels The ship painted is not identified; the subject is linked to the massacre on the slave ship Zong in 1781, when 132 enslaved Africans were thrown overboard as drinking water ran low so that insurance payments could be collected.
Sources Wikipedia · MFA Boston
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Print
Reliance Named ship
The Wreck of the Reliance (November 12, 1842), 1843
Artist George Baxter (1804 to 1867)
Where to see it Art Institute of Chicago (1946.957)
Medium Steel engraving with block printing in oil-based coloured inks on paper
George Baxter, known as the Picture Printer, made technically inventive prints of the great events of his day, both the triumphs and the tragedies. For the loss of the tea ship Reliance in November 1842 he based his tableau on the description given by the only English survivor, and built the image from about eight colour blocks printed over an engraved key plate. Of the 116 people aboard, only seven survived. The result is a small, vividly coloured sheet about a great grief, made to bring a distant disaster home to British viewers.
The real ship The Reliance was a merchant ship in the tea trade, wrecked on 12 November 1842; of the 116 aboard, only seven survived.
Sources Art Institute of Chicago
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Ann of Sunderland Named ship
A Large Ship under Caulking at Frederikshavn (Et større skib under kalfatring ved Frederikshavn), 1847
Artist Martinus Rørbye (1803 to 1848)
Where to see it Musée du Louvre, Paris (RFML.PE.2023.5.1)
Medium Oil on cardboard
On the night of 27 to 28 November 1846 the schooner Ann of Sunderland, bound from Stettin to London, was wrecked on the reef at Skagen. Local fishermen saved her six crew and her cargo of grain; the wreck was towed ashore and sold at auction to the timber merchant Søren Møllebygger. Rørbye painted her in August 1847 on the beach itself, and grains of sand are trapped in the paint. The Louvre reads the scene as caulking, damaged planks replaced with new wood, though some historians have argued she was being broken up. Either way, the great bare hull is a ship between death and second life.
The real ship Ann of Sunderland was a schooner wrecked on Skagen Reef on 27 to 28 November 1846 on passage from Stettin to London with grain; the salvaged hull was sold on 31 December 1846 to Søren Møllebygger, who had it partly dismantled and repaired in 1847.
Image: Martinus Rørbye, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Drawing
Ocean Monarch, with the steam frigate Affonso, the yacht Queen of the Ocean and the paddle steamer Prince of Wales Named ship
Burning of the Ocean Monarch, emigrant ship, 24 August 1848
Artist Attributed to François d'Orléans, Prince de Joinville (1818 to 1900)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (PAF7740)
Medium Watercolour heightened with white, with scratching out
The Ocean Monarch had left Liverpool for Boston that morning with about 360 emigrants when fire broke out some fifty miles out, off Great Orme's Head. Her captain dropped anchor and threw the spars overboard for those who had jumped; nearly half her passengers died. Here the fire blazes in her stern while the passengers crowd into the bow, some clambering down lines towards the boats. The Brazilian steam frigate Affonso, which had the Prince de Joinville on board, came to help, and the drawing is attributed to that prince, which would make it a witness's view.
“The majority of her passengers are crowded towards the bow to escape the flames”
The real ship The Ocean Monarch, an American emigrant barque, left Liverpool for Boston on 24 August 1848 with about 360 passengers. Fire broke out at midday about fifty miles out; the Affonso, the steamer Prince of Wales, a yacht and the packet New World came to her aid, but nearly 180 people died.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich
Image: Attributed to François d'Orléans, Prince de Joinville, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
A sailing ship wrecked off Ferring on the Jutland coast Unnamed
Shipwreck after a Storm off the West Coast of Jutland near Ferring Church (Skibbrud efter en storm ved Jyllands vestkyst ud for Ferring Kirke), c. 1848
Artist Carl Frederik Sørensen (1818 to 1879)
Where to see it Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (KMS547)
Medium Oil on canvas
The storm has passed, but on the exposed west coast of Jutland the sea it leaves behind is still dangerous. Sørensen, a Danish marine painter whose work found buyers as far as the courts of St Petersburg, London and Athens, paints a sailing ship wrecked off Ferring, with the village church on the coast as the landmark that names the place. The subject is the aftermath rather than the drama. The canvas, dated 1848, is in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen.
The vessels An unnamed sailing vessel driven ashore on the exposed North Sea coast of western Jutland.
Image: Carl Frederik Sørensen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Print
RMS Amazon Named ship
The Destruction of the Royal West India Steam Company's Ship Amazon by Fire, in the Bay of Biscay, on the morning of January 4th 1852, on her first outward Voyage
Artist Thomas Goldsworthy Dutton, published by Rudolph Ackermann, printed by Day and Son
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (PAH8961)
Medium Lithograph, coloured
The Amazon was brand new, a Royal Mail steamer on her maiden voyage to the West Indies, when she caught fire in the Bay of Biscay two days after sailing. Between 105 and 115 people died, among them the popular travel writer and novelist Eliot Warburton, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert championed a national appeal for the bereaved. Dutton signed this print and dated it in the plate 22 January 1852, less than three weeks after the disaster, and its long title reads like a report for a public hungry for news.
The real ship Built by R and H Green at Blackwall Yard and launched on 28 June 1851, the Amazon was one of five wooden-hulled paddle steamers ordered by the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. She left on her maiden voyage on 2 January 1852 and was destroyed by fire in the Bay of Biscay on 4 January.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, where the original is kept. Photo: TxllxT, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Drawing
HMS Birkenhead Named ship
Loss of the Birkenhead, 26 February 1852, 1852 to 1890
Artist Ralph MacGeough Bond Shelton (born c. 1833)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (PAH0930)
Medium Watercolour on card, heightened with white
This is the wreck as seen by one who lived through it. Bond Shelton was a nineteen-year-old cornet in the 12th Royal Lancers aboard the Birkenhead when she was lost, and he survived. His drawing was shown at the Royal Military and Royal Naval Exhibitions at Chelsea Hospital in 1890 and 1891, and is said to have inspired Thomas Hemy's better-known oil. The story it records became a byword for discipline: the soldiers held steady while all the women and children were put into the boats and landed safely.
The real ship Laid down at John Laird's yard in Birkenhead as the steam frigate Vulcan, launched in 1845 and reclassified as a troopship in 1851, the paddle steamer Birkenhead struck an uncharted rock off Danger Point near Gansbaai on 26 February 1852. A second impact broke her in two; of about 643 people aboard, only 193 were saved.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Image: Ralph MacGeough Bond Shelton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Print
HMS Birkenhead Named ship
Wreck of Her Majesty's Steam Frigate Birkenhead on the 26th February off Point Danger near the Cape of Good Hope, 1852
Artist Read and Co.
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (PAF8101)
Medium Lithograph, hand-coloured
Dated 15 April 1852, only seven weeks after the wreck, this hand-coloured lithograph is the disaster as the public first saw it. Its inscription gives the figures as they were then understood: 630 passengers and crew, 438 of them lost. The legend of the Birkenhead, soldiers holding steady so that the women and children could be saved, was only beginning; later painters such as Thomas Hemy, inspired by a survivor's drawing, would give it its heroic form.
“with 630 Passengers & Crew - 438 of whom were lost”
The real ship Laid down at John Laird's yard in Birkenhead as the steam frigate Vulcan and launched in 1845, then reclassified as a troopship in 1851, the Birkenhead struck an uncharted rock off Danger Point near Gansbaai on 26 February 1852 and broke in two; of about 643 aboard only 193 were saved.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Droits de l'Homme, with HMS Indefatigable and HMS Amazon Named ship
The Wreck of the Droits de l'Homme (Naufrage du Droits de l'Homme), 1853
Artist Léopold Le Guen
Where to see it Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brest
Medium Oil on canvas
Returning from the failed French expedition to Ireland, the 74-gun Droits de l'Homme was caught off Brittany on 13 January 1797 by the British frigates Indefatigable and Amazon. For more than fifteen hours, in a rising gale close to the rocky Breton coast, the seas were so heavy that she could not open her lower gunports, and the nimbler frigates battered her until she was swept onto a sandbar and destroyed. Between 400 and 1,000 of the 1,300 people aboard died, and the Amazon was wrecked too. Le Guen places the French ship at the centre, between the two frigates.
The real ship Droits de l'Homme was a French 74-gun ship of the line of the Expédition d'Irlande of 1796 to 1797; she was destroyed on the Breton coast after her action with HMS Indefatigable (44) and HMS Amazon (36), which was also lost with six men drowned.
Sources Wikidata · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Léopold Le Guen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
HMS St Jean d'Acre and her rescue boat Named ship
Man Overboard: Rescue Launch from HMS St Jean d'Acre, after 1854
Artist Oswald Walters Brierly (1817 to 1894)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (BHC3619)
Medium Oil on canvas
Brierly knew this ship from the inside: in 1854, during the Crimean War, he sailed to the Baltic as the guest of Captain Harry Keppel in the St Jean d'Acre, and this picture interprets an incident from that voyage. The great three-decker, in the Navy's black-and-white livery, has hove to, flying the Church pendant as the signal for a man overboard, her rigging lined with watching sailors. In the heavy swell the man raises his arm towards two sailors standing up in the rescue boat as it crests a wave. The whole ship waits on one life.
The real ship HMS St Jean d'Acre was a three-decker first-rate of 101 guns, dating from 1853, which served in the Baltic during the Crimean War under Captain Harry Keppel.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Image: Oswald Walters Brierly, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Print
San Francisco (steamship, lost 1853 to 1854) Named ship
The Wreck of the Steam Ship "San Francisco", Disabled on Her Voyage from New York to San Francisco, Dec. 24th, 1853, and in a Sinking Condition, 1854
Artist After James E. Buttersworth (1817 to 1894); published by Nathaniel Currier
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (63.550.545)
Medium Hand-coloured lithograph
A news picture of a disaster followed around the world. In late December 1853 the steamship San Francisco, bound from New York for California with passengers and United States Army soldiers aboard, was caught in a storm off the Atlantic seaboard and disabled, in danger of sinking. Over the following week the ship Antarctic under Captain George Stouffer and two other ships took off about three quarters of those aboard. Currier's lithograph, after a design by the marine painter James E. Buttersworth, carried the scene to a public anxious for news.
The real ship San Francisco was a steamship carrying passengers and soldiers from New York towards San Francisco when she was disabled in a storm on 24 December 1853; about 500 people were rescued by the Antarctic of New York, the Three Bells of Glasgow and a third ship.
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where the original is kept. Photo: Arad, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
A sailing ship wrecked under the cliffs of Mount Athos Unnamed
Shipwreck off Mount Athos (Korablekrushenie u Afonskoy gory), 1856
Artist Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900)
Where to see it Central Naval Museum, St Petersburg
Medium Oil on canvas
Aivazovsky painted this wreck on the coast of Athos, the Holy Mountain of the northern Aegean, in 1856. A sailing ship is lost under the cliffs of the peninsula, and the painter, one of the great masters of marine art, makes the light and the sea the true subject of the picture while the ship is overwhelmed. The canvas, just under one and a half metres wide, is in the Central Naval Museum in St Petersburg, which also holds his pictures of the Black Sea fleet's raids in the war of 1877.
The vessels An unnamed sailing vessel lost on the rocky coast of the Athos peninsula in the northern Aegean.
Sources Wikipedia (RU) · Wikipedia
Image: Ivan Aivazovsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Lefort Named ship
Shipwreck of the Lefort. An Allegorical Image, 1858
Artist Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900)
Where to see it Central Naval Museum, St Petersburg
Medium Oil on canvas
When the Lefort capsized in a squall in the Gulf of Finland in September 1857, taking all 826 people aboard with her, including sailors' wives and children, the naval officers of Kronstadt ordered a painting from Aivazovsky. He made it an allegory, intended for the Kronstadt chapel, so that the lost ship would be read as a requiem for everyone who has perished at sea. Alexander II had other ideas and ordered it hung in the Kronstadt Maritime Assembly, on the strength of its quality as a picture. It now belongs to the Central Naval Museum.
“was to be perceived as a requiem to all those who perished at sea”
The real ship The Lefort, an 84-gun wooden ship of the line of the Empress Alexandra class, was laid down on 18 November 1833. Sailing from Revel to Kronstadt with two other ships, she was rolled onto her port side by a squall between Gogland and Bolshoy Tyuters on 10 September 1857 (Julian calendar) and capsized; nobody survived. Her wreck was found at a depth of 70 metres in 2013.
Sources eng.navalmuseum.ru · uwex.org · wikiart.org
Image: Ivan Aivazovsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Eastern Monarch Named ship
Burning of the Troopship Eastern Monarch at Spithead, June 1859
Artist Arthur Wellington Fowles
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (BHC3304)
Medium Oil on canvas
Fowles signed and dated this picture in the very year of the disaster. On 4 June 1859 the troopship Eastern Monarch, belonging to the Somes Brothers of London, suffered an explosion on board off Spithead, caught fire and sank; HMS Flying Fish and HMS Falcon rescued the survivors. Fowles recorded the loss while it was still news, and his canvas is now in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. It is reportage in oil, a troopship lost in the roadstead off Portsmouth, set down while the smoke had hardly cleared.
The real ship Eastern Monarch was a troopship owned by the Somes Brothers and registered at London (Lloyd's Register 1858 to 1859); she burned and sank off Spithead on 4 June 1859 after an explosion on board.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Image: Arthur Wellington Fowles, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Forfarshire and the Darlings' coble Named ship
Grace Darling and her Father William Darling save the Survivors from the Wreck of the Steamer Forfarshire on the Farne Rocks, 7th September 1838, 1860
Artist William Bell Scott (1811 to 1890)
Where to see it National Trust, Wallington, Northumberland (NT 584371)
Medium Oil on canvas
Commissioned by Sir Walter Trevelyan to decorate the courtyard at Wallington, this is one of Bell Scott's eight oil paintings illustrating the history of the English Border, signed and dated January to October 1860. In it Grace's rescue takes its place in a Northumbrian epic. The National Trust recounts how William Darling, seeing a handful of survivors on rocks a mile away across a fast channel, thought rescue impossible until Grace insisted they try. The painter used his great friend Alice Boyd as the model for the woman on the wreck.
“Together they launched the coble and rowed out to the wreck and saved eight lives.”
The real ship The paddle steamer Forfarshire struck Big Harcar in the Farne Islands on 7 September 1838 and broke in two; William and Grace Darling rowed their coble from the Longstone lighthouse to take off the survivors.
Sources nationaltrustcollections.org.uk · Wikipedia
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows Wallington Hall, Northumberland, where the original is kept. Photo: Hadrianus1959, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Nantucket (whaling ship), aground in 1859 Named ship
Shipwreck off Nantucket (Wreck off Nantucket after a Storm), c. 1860 to 1861
Artist William Bradford (1823 to 1892)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1971.192)
Medium Oil on canvas
On the night of 8 August 1859 the whaling ship Nantucket ran aground on Nashawena Island, one of the Elizabeth Islands at the entrance to Vineyard Sound. The next day Bradford left his studio in New Bedford to observe the scene, preparing this large, epic picture of the wreck. The Met connects the heavy seas and tilting ship to his recent work alongside Albert Van Beest, who had trained in the Dutch marine tradition, while the careful drawing of the whaler's deck and the small craft around her shows Bradford's own knowledge of ships.
The real ship Nantucket was a whaling ship that went aground at Nashawena Island in the Elizabeth Islands, Massachusetts, on the night of 8 August 1859.
Sources The Met
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Survivors' boat from a wrecked ship Myth and legend
Shipwreck off a Coast (Naufrage sur la côte), 1862
Artist Eugène Delacroix (1798 to 1863)
Where to see it Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Medium Oil on canvas
Painted the year before his death, this small canvas brings to an end Delacroix's long series of shipwreck pictures, which had begun with the Shipwreck of Don Juan twenty years earlier. At last Byron's castaways have made landfall, and in the left foreground one of them is being rescued from the sea. The brushstrokes are extremely loose, so that surf, sky and figures seem made of the same rushing weather. It reads as an epilogue to Don Juan: the shore those starving men in their boat had longed for.
The legend No real ship is identified; the scene has been read as the landfall of the survivors of the Don Juan shipwreck from Byron's poem.
Sources eclecticlight.co
Image: Eugène Delacroix, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Wreck of a small vessel stranded off Brace's Rock Unnamed
Brace's Rock, Eastern Point, Gloucester, c. 1863 to 1864
Artist Fitz Henry Lane (1804 to 1865)
Where to see it National Gallery of Art, Washington, John Wilmerding Collection (promised gift)
Medium Oil on canvas
Among Lane's last works is Brace's Rock on Eastern Point, a subject he painted more than once, with a wrecked hull lying just offshore in a jewel-like calm. In this version, slightly larger than the one at the Cape Ann Museum, the wreck heads towards the shore with more of its hull exposed, and the foreground boulders are more prominent and the autumn leaves brighter. The catalogue notes that where many painters of the day copied their own work almost exactly, Lane varied each version. The abandoned hull becomes an emblem of time and quiet loss.
“Lane, even in his last days, was not content to copy but varied the elements just enough to keep his interest”
The vessels The wreck is an unidentified small vessel, one of the stranded hulls Lane returned to repeatedly on the Gloucester shore.
Sources fitzhenrylaneonline.org
Image: Fitz Henry Lane, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Small sailing boats running for shelter on Narragansett Bay Unnamed
Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay, 1868
Artist Martin Johnson Heade (1819 to 1904)
Where to see it Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth (1977.17)
Medium Oil on canvas
A black sky fills the upper part of the canvas and a thin zigzag of lightning splits it, while below, the water of Narragansett Bay lies extremely calm. White sails are scattered across the bay, some under grey cloud, others already caught in the downpour. On the beach, among the timbers of an old shipwreck, one sailor furls the sail of his boat while two companions walk unhurriedly up the shore with oars and a bucket. The Amon Carter notes that Heade, largely self-taught, painted at least eight storm pictures between 1859 and 1868.
“thunderstorms, lightning bolts, and returning ships were used to symbolize the passage of the United States through an era of profound social turmoil”
The vessels The boats are the small sailing craft of the Rhode Island shore, used for fishing and pleasure on the sheltered waters of Narragansett Bay.
Sources cartermuseum.org · Wikipedia
Image: Martin Johnson Heade, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Print
Northfleet Named ship
Loss of the Northfleet (The Captain's Farewell), 1873
Artist Gust. May
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (PAF7747)
Medium Lithograph, coloured
The Northfleet was lying at anchor off Dungeness one January night in 1873, carrying labourers and their families with iron rails to build a railway in Tasmania, when a steamer ran her down and backed away into the darkness. The heavily laden ship sank within half an hour. Captain Edward Knowles went down with her; of the women aboard only his wife and one emigrant survived. This coloured print takes its subtitle from that parting, The Captain's Farewell, and turns a collision in the Channel into a Victorian tragedy of duty.
The real ship Built at Northfleet, Kent, in 1853 for Duncan Dunbar, the Northfleet traded to Australia, India and China. Run down at anchor off Dungeness on 22 January 1873 by a steamer later identified as the Spanish Murillo, she sank with the loss of 293 lives; 86 were saved.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Ingermanland Named ship
Loss of the Ship Ingermanland in the Skagerrak on the Night of 30 August 1842, 1876
Artist Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900)
Where to see it Central Naval Museum, St Petersburg
Medium Oil on canvas
Aivazovsky reconstructs a real night of terror long after it happened. The Ingermanland, launched at Arkhangelsk only months before, was sailing for the Baltic with her crew and a number of women and children when a storm drove her onto the rocks off the Norwegian coast; 389 people were reported dead. The painter, whose pictures of gales and storms number more than four thousand, chose one of the most dramatic moments of the disaster, so the picture serves as a memorial as much as a seascape. It is kept by the Russian Navy's own museum.
The real ship A 74-gun, three-masted ship of the line built at the Solombala yards in Arkhangelsk and launched on 24 May 1842. On her voyage to the Baltic she mistook the Oksøy light for another ship's lantern, grounded off Kristiansand and sank off Varhaug; 503 people were rescued and 389 reported dead, among them 21 women and seven children.
Sources eng.navalmuseum.ru · eclecticlight.co · Wikipedia
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Central Naval Museum, St Petersburg, where the original is kept. Photo: A.Savin, FAL, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Livadia Named ship
The Final Moments of the Imperial Yacht Livadia, 1878
Artist Alexey Bogolyubov (1824 to 1896)
Where to see it Private collection (sold at Sotheby's, London, 27 November 2007)
Medium Oil on canvas
Livadia was the Romanovs' Black Sea yacht and the only Russian imperial yacht to see active service, converted into an armed auxiliary cruiser in the war of 1877 to 1878, when she sank a Turkish schooner and survived an eighteen-hour pursuit by two Turkish ironclads. On the evening of 21 October 1878 she left Sevastopol for Odessa in bad weather, with none of the imperial family aboard, and in the fog of the next morning ran aground near the Tarkhankut lighthouse. The crew reached shore and saved most of the furnishings, but 47 days later the waves destroyed her. Bogolyubov, a former naval officer, was artist to the Navy headquarters.
The real ship Built in 1869 to 1873 by Leopold Schwede at Nikolaev, displacing 1,965 tons, with imperial suites designed by Ippolit Monighetti, she carried the Romanovs between Sevastopol and Yalta and was wrecked near Cape Tarkhankut, Crimea, on 22 October 1878.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Alexey Bogolyubov, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
HMS Endymion and a French ship of the line Named ship
HMS Endymion rescuing a French two decker, late 19th century
Artist Ebenezer Colls (1812 to 1887)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (BHC0532)
Medium Oil on canvas
In wartime, an enemy in distress is still a ship full of seamen. As the story was told, Captain Sir Charles Paget in the frigate Endymion found a French ship of the line embayed among rocks on a lee shore in a gale, bowsprit and foremast gone. He bore down, dropped his sheet anchor on the Frenchman's bow so she could haul herself clear, saving seven hundred lives, then club hauled his own ship off the rocks. Long doubted, the tale was confirmed in 1911 by Paget's grandson, who recalled that Sir Charles mostly worried how to explain the two lost anchors to the Admiralty.
“descried a French ship of the line in imminent danger, embayed among rocks upon a lee shore”
The real ship HMS Endymion was a large frigate launched in 1797 and commanded by Sir Charles Paget from 1803 to 1805. The French ship she rescued has never been identified.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Indian Chief, the lifeboat Bradford and the tug Vulcan Named ship
The Ramsgate lifeboat Bradford rescuing the crew of the Indian Chief, wrecked on Long Sands in January 1881
Artist Richard Henry Nibbs (1816 to 1893)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (BHC1268)
Medium Oil on canvas
Long catalogued simply as a shipwreck with a paddle tug towing a lifeboat in a gale, this canvas was later identified as one of the great Victorian rescues. The barque Indian Chief lies aground on the left, keeled over and dismasted, figures on her deck waving for help, while the Ramsgate harbour steamer tows the lifeboat Bradford out to her. The sun rising behind clearing clouds reads as dawn bringing hope. Nibbs gave the tug two funnels, though the Vulcan had only one. The coxswain, Charles Fish, received the RNLI gold medal.
The real ship The barque Indian Chief, bound from Middlesbrough to Yokohama, was driven onto the Long Sands in a gale early on 5 January 1881. The Ramsgate lifeboat Bradford, towed all night by the harbour steamer Vulcan, found her at dawn on 6 January and took off twelve men, though the second mate died of exposure; the master and sixteen others had already been washed away.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, where the original is kept. Photo: TxllxT, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Drawing
Iron Crown Named ship
Wreck of the Iron Crown, 1881
Artist Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it Baltimore Museum of Art
Medium Watercolour on paper
Homer lived for nearly two years, in 1881 and 1882, in the fishing village of Cullercoats on the north-east coast of England, where he saw the hard life of the fisherfolk at first hand. In the early morning of 21 October 1881 the thousand-ton barque Iron Crown was driven aground in a storm, and her crew were rescued over the following hours. Homer built this watercolour, probably from sketches, witness accounts and photographs, around the second and final pass of the lifeboat, needed to take off the last man aboard. Cullercoats left a lasting change in his art.
The real ship The Iron Crown, a barque of about a thousand tons, was driven aground in a storm on the north-east coast of England in the early morning of 21 October 1881; her crew were rescued and the wreck broke up.
Sources eclecticlight.co
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Baltimore Museum of Art, where the original is kept. Photo: Nrswanson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Skagen lifeboat Unnamed
The Lifeboat is Taken through the Dunes (Redningsbåden køres gennem klitterne), 1883
Artist Michael Ancher (1849 to 1927)
Where to see it Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (KMS1222)
Medium Oil on canvas
There is no wreck in the foreground, only the effort to reach it. Through snow-covered dunes a team of horses drags the Skagen lifeboat on its carriage, while a crowd of fishermen in oilskins and sou'westers trudges behind; one man calls out through cupped hands, another carries a spade, and far out on the grey sea at the right a ship in distress waits. Michael Ancher made Skagen's fishermen and their dramatic experiences at sea his life's subject, and this canvas of 1883 is counted among his key works.
The vessels The Skagen lifeboat was kept ashore and hauled across the dunes to be launched to ships in distress off the coast; here it travels on a wheeled carriage drawn by horses.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Foundering ship and breeches buoy Unnamed
The Life Line, 1884
Artist Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it Philadelphia Museum of Art (E1924-4-15)
Medium Oil on canvas
Homer paints the rescue, not the wreck. The dramatic transfer from a foundering ship was made possible by a recent lifesaving device, the breeches buoy, secured to ship and shore and hauled back and forth on a pulley. Cropped to its essentials, the picture thrusts us into the action: massive waves roll past, drenching a semiconscious woman and the anonymous man who carries her to safety. Critics recognised it at once as a major contribution to American art.
“portraying a heroic, contemporary subject with both painterly virtuosity and detailed observation”
The vessels The ship is unnamed. The breeches buoy, a recent innovation in the 1880s, was secured between a stranded vessel and the shore so that people could be hauled to safety on a pulley.
Sources Philadelphia Museum of Art · Wikipedia
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Ancon (side-wheel steamer, 1867) Named ship
Wreck of the 'Ancon' in Loring Bay, Alaska, 1889
Artist Albert Bierstadt (1830 to 1902)
Where to see it Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (47.1250)
Medium Painting
Bierstadt was there. At 3 in the morning on 28 August 1889 the excursion steamer Ancon, leaving the salmon saltery wharf at Loring, Alaska, on an ebbing tide, drifted sideways when her stern line was let go too early and grounded on a reef a few hundred feet from shore. As the tide fell she broke in two; some passengers had to escape through their cabin windows. The packing company sheltered them in its buildings, private homes and Tlingit houses. Bierstadt wrote to his wife of a narrow escape, saved his art supplies and made sixty colour studies, this wreck among them.
The real ship Ancon, a wooden side-wheel steamer, was launched at Hunter's Point, San Francisco, in 1867 as a ferry for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company at Panama, rebuilt as an ocean-going ship in 1872, and from 1887 ran permanently in the Alaska trade for the Pacific Coast Steamship Company. After the 1889 wreck two thirds of her cargo was salvaged and the hulk was burned.
Sources Wikipedia · MFA Boston
Image: Albert Bierstadt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Ship's boat lettered Concarneau Named in the picture
Adieu!, 1892
Artist Alfred Guillou (1844 to 1926)
Where to see it Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper
Medium Oil on canvas
Guillou, born and buried in Concarneau, turns away from the spectacle of the wreck to its human cost. A survivor, in the stern of a ship's boat whose name, Concarneau, places the scene on the coast of Brittany, embraces a boy, probably his son, who has not survived. The title is the only word needed. Nearly two and a half metres wide, the canvas belongs to a moment late in the century when painters moved closer to consider the human consequences of shipwreck.
The vessels A ship's boat lettered Concarneau, the Breton port where Guillou was born and died.
Sources eclecticlight.co · Wikipedia (FR)
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Maria Named ship
The Ship Maria in a Storm (Korabl Mariya vo vremya shtorma), 1892
Artist Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 to 1900)
Where to see it Aivazovsky National Art Gallery, Feodosia
Medium Oil on canvas
A very large canvas, more than three and a half metres wide, painted by Aivazovsky in 1892 when he was in his mid-seventies, and now in the Aivazovsky National Art Gallery in Feodosia. The Russian title names the ship simply Maria and shows her in a storm; she is a sailing warship alone against the sea. At this scale the viewer seems to stand in the trough of the wave beside her. It is a late work by the painter many consider one of the greatest masters of marine art.
The real ship The Russian title names the ship simply Maria; she is shown as a sailing ship in a storm. The vessel herself has not been identified.
Sources Wikipedia (RU) · Wikipedia
Image: Ivan Aivazovsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
HMS Birkenhead Named ship
The Wreck of the Birkenhead, c. 1892
Artist Thomas Marie Madawaska Hemy (1852 to 1937)
Location Large original lost; a smaller version survives
Medium Painting
Forty years after the wreck, Hemy painted the scene Victorian Britain wanted to remember: soldiers, marines and sailors standing on deck while the women and children are taken off the stricken troopship. The Royal Museums Greenwich record that he was inspired by the drawing of the survivor Bond Shelton, shown at Chelsea in 1890. The large canvas is now lost and is known from a smaller version, but its image lasted, and so did the phrase it illustrates: Kipling's Birkenhead drill, courage in hopeless circumstances.
“to stand an' be still to the Birken'ead drill is a damn tough bullet to chew”
The real ship Launched at John Laird's yard in Birkenhead in 1845 and reclassified as a troopship in 1851, the paddle steamer Birkenhead struck an uncharted rock off Danger Point, South Africa, on 26 February 1852 and broke in two; of about 643 aboard only 193 were saved, among them all the women and children.
Sources royalmarineshistory.com · Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Image: Thomas Marie Madawaska Hemy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Drawing
HMS Victoria Named ship
H.M.S. Victoria sinking by the bows after clearing Camperdown, probably 1893
Artist Reginald Graham Gregory
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (PAD6306)
Medium Watercolour with bodycolour
Off Tripoli on 22 June 1893 the Mediterranean Fleet was steaming in two divisions only 1,200 yards apart when Vice Admiral Sir George Tryon ordered them to turn in succession and reverse course, though the ships needed at least 1,600 yards to turn. As his flagship Victoria turned, the armoured ram of the Camperdown struck her. This watercolour, kept with others recording the collision, shows the stricken battleship going down by the bows after drawing clear of the Camperdown; she sank in about fifteen minutes. Among the survivors was John Jellicoe, later commander-in-chief of the Grand Fleet at Jutland.
The real ship Built by Armstrong, Mitchell and Co at Elswick and launched on 9 April 1887, the Victoria was lead ship of her class of two and flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet. She sank after the collision with HMS Camperdown near Tripoli on 22 June 1893; 358 of her crew died, including Admiral Tryon.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, where the original is kept. Photo: TxllxT, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Drawing
Shattered fragments of a small Bahamian boat Unnamed
After the Hurricane, Bahamas, 1899
Artist Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it Art Institute of Chicago (1933.1235)
Medium Watercolour over graphite
Homer painted this watercolour on his second visit to the Bahamas, in the winter of 1898 to 1899. A luckless man lies washed up on the beach, surrounded by the fragments of his shattered boat. Sunlight glints through thinning storm clouds, and thick strokes of opaque red and yellow mark the seaweed tossed on the sand, against the thin, fluid washes of the retreating waves. The Art Institute sees in it Homer's fascination with the sudden and dangerous weather of the islands; on the back of the sheet he wrote 'After the Tornado'. The broken craft is all that is left to tell the story.
The vessels The wreck is of a small island boat, known only from the fragments the Art Institute describes around the man on the beach.
Sources Art Institute of Chicago
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Anna, Key West Named in the picture
The Gulf Stream, 1899, reworked by 1906
Artist Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (06.1234)
Medium Oil on canvas
A Black sailor lies on the deck of a small dismasted, rudderless fishing boat, sharks around him and storm-tossed waves on every side. Homer, who crossed the Gulf Stream many times, built the picture from watercolours made at Nassau in the winter of 1898 to 1899, and went on reworking it after it was first shown: breaking the gunwale, making the name Anna, Key West legible and adding a ship on the far horizon, perhaps to ease the desolation. In 1906 the jury of the National Academy of Design petitioned the Met to buy it. Homer refused to explain it.
“The boat & sharks are outside matters of very little consequence.”
The vessels An imagined small fishing boat, dismasted and without a rudder, lettered Anna, Key West on her stern; boats of this kind worked the waters Homer knew around Florida and the Bahamas.
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Lifeboat adrift after a shipwreck Unnamed
The Wreck (L'Épave), before 1901
Artist Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 to 1904)
Where to see it Private collection (sold at Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 31 May 2024)
Medium Oil on canvas
Gérôme gives us no ship at all, only what is left of one. In the lower left corner a lifeboat drifts with a small mast carrying a scrap of white cloth. There has been a shipwreck of which no trace remains, and there were no survivors. The sea is calm and the sky clear, and that stillness is the shock of the picture. Unknown until 2024, when it was found in a Paris dealer's stock and sold at the Hôtel Drouot, the canvas was at once connected by viewers with the migrants lost in the Mediterranean today.
The vessels An unnamed ship's lifeboat, fitted with a makeshift mast and distress flag, adrift after the loss of its ship; the painting refers to no identified wreck.
Sources Wikipedia (FR) · gazette-drouot.com
No free image of this work exists.
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
SS Sirio Named ship
Wreckage of the Sirio (Naufrágio do Sírio), 1907
Artist Benedito Calixto (1853 to 1927)
Where to see it Museu de Arte Sacra de São Paulo
Medium Oil on canvas
Among the passengers on the Sirio when she ran aground at full speed off Cape Palos in August 1906 was the Bishop of São Paulo, José de Camargo Barros, who is said to have gone down with the ship while blessing the drowning. A year later the Brazilian painter Benedito Calixto made this memorial. On the sinking ship a bishop blesses two kneeling Benedictines: Boniface Natter, first abbot of the refounded Buckfast Abbey, who drowned, and Anscar Vonier, who survived to succeed him. That is why a shipwreck hangs in São Paulo's Museum of Sacred Art.
The real ship A passenger steamer of about 4,141 tons built by Robert Napier and Sons of Glasgow for Genoese owners and later run by Navigazione Generale Italiana, the Sirio carried emigrants to South America. She ran aground off Cape Palos, Spain, on 4 August 1906, and at least two hundred people died; the wreck was remembered in popular songs of the time.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia · Wikipedia (PT)
Image: Benedito Calixto, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
Boyd Named ship
The Burning of the Boyd, Whangaroa Harbour, 1809, 1908
Artist Walter Wright (1866 to 1933)
Where to see it Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland (1908/1/3)
Medium Oil on canvas
In October 1809 the brigantine Boyd sailed from Sydney Cove to Whangaroa Harbour to load kauri spars. Aboard was Te Ara, a man of rank of Ngāti Pou, who was flogged on the voyage; in December his people attacked the ship in retaliation, and between 66 and 70 of those aboard were killed. Afterwards the Boyd was taken to their village, and when a flint was struck near the gunpowder barrels in her hold she burned to the waterline of her copper sheathing; the hull was declared tapu. News of the killings delayed the first missionary visits and nearly emptied the coast of shipping for years.
The real ship Boyd was a 395-ton brigantine that had carried convicts to New South Wales; under Captain John Thompson she sailed from Sydney Cove to Whangaroa in October 1809 with about 70 people aboard, was captured there in December and burned out when her gunpowder ignited.
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Print
RMS Titanic Named ship
The Sinking of the Titanic (Der Untergang der Titanic), 1912
Artist Willy Stöwer (1864 to 1931)
Source Published in the magazine Die Gartenlaube, 1912
Medium Illustration for the magazine Die Gartenlaube
Willy Stöwer, the son of a sea captain and a former shipyard technician, drew the Titanic going down shortly after the disaster, without detailed information, for the magazine Die Gartenlaube. There are errors, most famously black smoke pouring from the fourth funnel, which was only for ventilation. It did not matter. The illustration earned him particular popularity and has been reprinted many times since, so that for many people it simply is the sinking of the Titanic.
The real ship Built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast and launched on 31 May 1911, the Titanic sailed on her maiden voyage on 10 April 1912, struck an iceberg and sank on 15 April 1912; approximately 1,500 people died.
Sources Wikipedia
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
RMS Carpathia Named ship
View of Steamship Carpathia Passing along the Edge of the Ice Flow after Rescuing Survivors of the Titanic, 1912
Artist Colin Campbell Cooper (1856 to 1937)
Where to see it Location not recorded
Medium Gouache on cardboard
The American painter Colin Campbell Cooper and his wife happened to be passengers aboard the Carpathia when she went to the rescue of the Titanic's survivors on 15 April 1912. They gave up their cabin so that survivors would have berths to sleep in, and Cooper helped in the rescue and made several paintings recording what he saw. This one shows the rescue ship afterwards, passing along the edge of the ice. It is a rare thing: a picture of the Titanic's aftermath painted by a witness.
The real ship The Cunard liner Carpathia answered the Titanic's distress calls and picked up her surviving lifeboats on the morning of 15 April 1912.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Colin Campbell Cooper, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wrecks, storms and rescue · Painting
RMS Lancastria Named ship
Sinking of the Lancastria, 17 June 1940, probably 1960s
Artist Robert W. May
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (BHC0673)
Medium Oil on textured artists' paper
The Lancastria was evacuating British troops and civilians from St Nazaire, perhaps more than 7,000 people, when German aircraft bombed her; in less than twenty minutes she rolled over and sank. It is regarded as the worst loss of life Britain ever suffered from one vessel, and the news was at first suppressed to protect morale. May paints the aftermath from the water: a crowded lifeboat with the ship's name on its side, people clinging to planks in an oil slick, bombers overhead and the ship burning in the distance, all under a clear blue sky that makes the scene feel unreal.
The real ship Built by William Beardmore at Dalmuir and launched in 1920 as Tyrrhenia for the Anchor Line, a Cunard subsidiary, she was renamed Lancastria in 1924 and became a troopship in the Second World War. She was bombed and sunk off St Nazaire on 17 June 1940; an estimated 4,500 to 5,000 people died and about 2,500 were rescued.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, where the original is kept. Photo: TxllxT, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
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