The Venetian P. Coronelli designed these camels ca . 1630 to overcome the draft problems of his port city. It was claimed that a loaded ship could be lifted eight (Venetian) f eet. The fleets of Denmark and Sweden engage each other in the Second Battle of Fehrman in 1644. Oil, 161 x 284 mm by J .C. Andresen.
26
seen such a picture before. Thus, for their unique interest, it was felt that pictures of this sort should take preference over more hackneyed subjects, however important they might seem to be . So we included the Korean tortoise boats routing the Japanese at much the same period together with details of the Battles of the Svold and of Salamis from the same hand. We went to Groves for these not only because he entered into the spirit of the enterprise but because we feel he outshines his contemporary marine artists in his figure work . Other artists helped with their work. Derek Gardiner's name needs no introduction and, if I mention in particular his magnificent painting of the Battle of Quiberon Bay it is because it must be one of the more faithful pictures of naval battles. As a rule, those artists who have portrayed close fleet actions have assumed that the scene was visible . Of course , this was seldom the case for, once the cannon in its varying forms took hold , the admirals often had little more idea what was going on than generals ashore , due to the pall of smoke which quickly obliterated the scene of battles. But Quiberon Bay was fought in a gale of wind and on a lee shore! This generation is fortunate in having a few marine artists whose work is in the top class and who do not play to the gallery by over-dramatizing their subjects (e.g. painting a clipper leaving South Street under all sai l! ). These are men whose ships sit in the water properly and who do their research before taking up their brushes. It was to some of these that we turned: Mark Myers whose inspired endpapers alone do much to trace the development of the ship herself; to C-H Friberg in Sweden, whose painstaking pictures reveal more under glass than the eye itself can discern; to Cdr. Rex Philips whose convoy scene gives a better idea of atmosphere than any photograph , and to others. It was not all plain sailing. Some pictures we simply could not locate. Indeed , they may no longer exist. The situation over the last century was eased by photography in some sense, and of course color photography on ly helped in the last few decades . Certainly the color photo of the last Atlantic
SEA HISTORY , AUTUMN 1986