I do enjoy a good dreadnought. This is HMS Barham leading her sisters in battle, a homage to Turner. JMW Turner’s masterpiece, perhaps his greatest work, The Fighting Tremeraire, is a magnificently sentimental painting of an old line-of-battleship being taken to be broken up, a sailing ship being dragged to its doom by a steam-powered tug, the past being subsumed by the present.
The composition and the pallete echo that of Turner, but there is little of his sentimentality or the broader themes that permeate his ‘Tremeraire.’ What I like to think this painting is about is vulnerability.
I clearly have form for cribbing from Turner. Santiago’s Return is a much more blatant homage, though it is absent a battleship, iron or otherwise, it follows the Turner’s structure more slavishly.
The Royal Navy’s last class of battleships before the singular HMS Vanguard were the King George Vs. HMS Duke of York, realised in charcoal from images taken of her during gunnery practice in foul weather.
HMS Monarch, passing beneath the Tyne railway bridge after completion by her builder. A charcoal drawing of a battleship on a toothy paper, this image nicely correlates soot and industry of the era, and grainy reference photo. My antecedents on my father’s side were a family of shipbuilders and merchant seamen, originating in Ireland they made their way to the north-east of England via the shipyards of Belfast, Glasgow and the Tyne. I like to think that one of my ancestors watched this ship as she made her way down river to the sea.
