Introduction

As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean

Inspiration usually comes to me in my bath. The evening that I lay there pondering on the above words from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was no exception.

Painted ships had no right to be idle, I thought, and painted yachts should fly. The Ancient Mariner was wrong; a painting was no more exciting to him than a dead albatross. Perhaps, if we could paint famous racing yachts, and capture on canvas epic moments from the history of the greatest yacht race in the world, the America’s Cup, ‘We’d be the first, that ever burst out of that silent sea’.

By the time I stopped dreaming and stepped ashore, my bath was as cold as an iceberg.

My first reaction, before turning in, was to telephone Tim Thompson. He always worked late, very often until the birds started singing in the morning. ‘I have an idea,’ I said.

My interest in marine painting began when my father died. With my wife and two sons I had moved to our family house in Devonshire, built by my parents the year I was born. Sadly, many of the paintings I had grown up with had gone elsewhere, and the bare walls filled us with gloom.

When we moved to Ashcombe one of the first alterations we made was to convert an old squash court into a studio with a panoramic window facing the sea. The house stands at almost a thousand feet above sea level and being only three miles from the coast has breathtaking views.

Inspired by this setting, I thought of painting some canvases myself, for I had won a landscape prize at school, but I was too busy farming, and out of practice, so I felt that the results would be similarly ‘muddy’!

Fortunately, we had been left one beautiful painting, by Peter Monamy, of warships in Torbay. It hung over the fireplace in our dining room, and it cried out for some nautical companions. Then we heard of Thompson, a young marine artist who lived in Cornwall. He sounded promising, for apparently he painted in the manner of the old masters, but sadly we had no idea how to find him.

One winter’s day, we sat down with our telephone books and called almost every Thompson in Cornwall. ‘Are you Thompson the artist?’ I would enquire. ‘No, are you Bones the Butcher?’ some joker would reply. But at last we found him under the initial ‘T’, and we arranged to meet him at his cottage high up on the edge of Dartmoor.