BOOKS family-in oils. His son Antoine (AngeJoseph Antoine, 1765-1835) inherited his business and his talents, and became the real progenitor and teacher of the artistic family. All three of Antoine's so ns became hydrographers and marine painters and his daughter painted too . His own eldest son, Antoine fils (Jr .) (Mathiru-Antoine, 1799-1872) inherited an uncle's business but was, as the author states, the least prolific and least ta len ted of the (male) Roux painters, though far superior to most others of his time. There are few present-day cc)llectors , this reviewer wou ld add, who would sco rn one of his works. Frederic (Francois-Joseph Frederic, 1805- 1870) was privileged to train in the studi o of the Vernets in Paris, another and more famous French dynasty of marine painters, and was the only member lo desert Marseille. He opened a hydrographic shop and marine painting studio at Le Havre. A biographer says that "He was soon the recognized painter of a ll the American captains, who were astonished at his prodigious facility." Antoine Roux' s third son Francois (Francois-Geoffroi, 1811-1882) inherited his father's hydrographic shop, and there, "whi le sellin g charts and compasses, gave himself up with passion to his art." He was commissioned to paint a remarkable series of watercolors, now mostly in the Musee de la Marine but intended for the Louvre. His grandfather Joseph had a warrant as "Hydrographe du Roi," but Francois was the only Roux to wear the red ribbon of the Legion d' Honneur. With his death in 1882 the era of the Roux marine painters of Marseille came to an end. A sister, Ursule, born in 1801, was a watercolorist, and not bad judging from the Peabody's one example, but nothing is known of her life and little of her art. Mr. Smith has written an informative, interesting and decorative book. In so doing he has had the advantage of earlier work, especially of French students of the Roux painters, of a former generation of Peabody Museum curators, and of publications of the former Marine Research Society of Salem. He has used such material in combination with original research and close study of the Museum Collection to produce a work informative even to those long interested in the subject. The book is difficult to critic ize, perhaps because the reviewer himself finds it so fascinating. The casual reader may at first be a bit confused by the format, but will soon note its advantages in marshalling the maximum information 58
in th e most easi ly accessib le way. Mr. Smith says: "The Fine Arts historian perhaps will see little merit in th e paintings as works of art. The maritime hi s torian will wax lyricai abo ut them . . .. " This reviewer, having at least looked at the Fine Arts for many yea rs, will accept many of these beautiful watercolors as in that category. The book is certain to remain an indispensa ble tool for future researchers in marine painting. S. MORTON VOSE II
Mr. Vose is the retired President of the Vose Galleries of Boston, the nation's oldest dealers in fine paintings. Active as consultant and appraiser in the Fine Arts, he has always had a special interest in marine paintings.
A Braynard Festival World's Greatest Ship: The Story of the Leviathan, by Frank 0 . Braynard (Newport News, VA, The Mariners Museum, 1978, 424 pp., illus. $35-or $26.50 to ['JMHS members ordering through SEA HISTORY) and Famous American Ships, Being an Historical Sketch of the United States as Told through Its Maritime Life, by Frank 0. Braynard (New York, Hastings House, rev. ed . 1978, 237 pp ., ill., $ 12.95). When Frank Braynard, impresario of Operation Sail, a founder of South Street Seaport Museum, and constant advocate of America's seafaring destiny decides to hold a festival, it is on acertain scale. Lately the Museum held a reception in his honor to introduce the latest volume of his Leviathan series, and a revised edition of his Famous Amer-
ican Ships. The 54,000-ton Leviathan was completed just before World wa¡r I as the Vaterland, a super ship built by the German pacifist-idealist Albert Ballin, and indeed the "world's greatest ship ." During the War, seized by the Americans, she served as troopship; after the War she was rebuilt by the American designer William Francis Gibbs to serve as the premier North Atlantic liner until, as the 1920s ended, a new generation of superliner, the French Ile de France, the German Europa and Bremen, the Italian Rex and Conte di Savoia, and ultimately the British Queen Mary (preserved today in Long Beach, California) and the French Normandie (burnt in New York during World War II) came along. Of these, only the Mary and the Normandie were larger than the Leviathan. In 1938 the outmoded Leviathan ex- Vaterland went to Scotland for scrap.
In Volume IV of the monumental
Leviathan series, Braynard takes up the ship's palmy years, 1927-29. Braynard's unique research apparat, numbering 1,500 enrolled members who receive a Leviathan newsletter, enables him to recreate the amazing depth and variety of life aboard the great liner whose career he followed from afar from the time he was a first grader onward. Moving in close today on the life of the sh ip 40 years after it ended, Braynard's pursuit of shipboard incident and personal histories ends up in cu ltural history remarkably evocative of the world the ship sailed in. A ship is, after a ll , a city, in the sea . As the volume ends, the sea giant, built for a speed of 22 Yi knots, has amassed a se ries of crossings approaching an average speed of 24 knots . Driven a bit too hard, she sticks her huge nose into a 40-foot sea-and a great crack opens in her upperwork s. Frank's research finds people who had heard rivets sheering off a week before that, in a lounge: "But it was a ll hidden below layers of linoleum and wood and carpet. When the last heavy outside plating went, the whole thing opened up for all to see." Much was learned in operating the Leviathan, and that learning was put to work by William Francis Gibbs, who went on to build the great liners America
and United States, as he had intended from the first to do . Both ships survive -the postwar United States as a technological wonder, and the fastest liner, by far, ever to swim the seas . In Famous American Ships, first published in 1956 and now reissued in an augmented edition, Braynard takes a close look at the 53,000-ton United States as one of sixty ships that shaped American maritime history. He quotes Williams Francis Gibbs who, asked if he were her designer, responded: "Ce rtainl y not! About half the marine-engineering brains of the country have been applied to this ship. A great ship is the most complicated structure man crea tes."
He went on to describe her as "the product of a prodigious explosive power-Amerian industry." Gibb's genius of course was to harness that "explosive power" to his purpose, in superb design. SEA HISTORY, WINTER 1979