MARINE ART LIVES Brett, Phoenix & Rose Bombarding New York, July 12, 1776. The city of 26,000 was surrounded by water and at the mercy of the British Navy.
OSWALD LONGFIELD BRETT grew up haunted by the sea in Australia, where he was born in 1921. He saw the beauty of the last sailing ships in Sydney Harbor as a boy, and wanted desperately to ship away with Alan Villiers, a fellow-Australian, when the latter brought his little full-rigger Joseph Conrad into port 40-odd years ago, on her famous round-the-world voyage. His
parents, however, insisted that he finish his formal schooling, and so he pursued his sea dreams in the studio of the late John Allcot, a distinguished marine painter. Only after further study in fine arts at the East Sydney Technical College was he granted his wish to go to sea, first as a deck boy in the coastal and Pacific Island trade, later in deepwatermen ranging from square riggers to such
WILLIAM G. MULLER was born in New York City in 1936 and grew up in northern Manhattan near the Hudson River. "During the 1940s," he says, "I became addicted to steamboat-watching from the Hudson's banks, and attempted my first steamboat drawings." After working summers during his high
school years on Day Line steamers as assistant purser, at age 18 he became quartermaster aboard the Alexander Hamilton, and is trustee of the society working to save that classic side-wheeler today (see "White Swan of the Hudson," SH No. 5). When this job died, he turned to commercial art, studying at
ocean liners as the Aquitania and Queen Elizabeth. Settled ashore in New York, Os became one of the founding volunteers of the South Street Seaport Museum, whose books he has illustrated and where his paintings hang today. Os and his wife Gertrude live quietly in Long Island, but in any odd corner of New York City where there is argument among knowledgeable people about ships, there you are likely to find them, a long, lanky, soft-spoken Australian and his bright-eyed lady, pursuing a deeply held interest they share.
Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts. Represented by Kennedy Galleries in New York, he states the goal of his lively, painstakingly researched art as "to keep alive the majesty and romance of the great American steamboat through the medium of oil on canvas."
Muller, tthe Hudson River Dayliner, C. Vibbard steaxms upriver.
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