MARINE ART: In Quest of the Enduring Image
S. Francis Smitheman I first saw Francis Smitheman from my window. He had set up a portable easel in a field at the end of the garden and was painting the nearby landscape, but with considerable difficulty, since a stiff breeze was playing havoc with the large canvas. Having art experience myself, I felt obliged to go out and offer some string to help secure canvas and easel. That evening he asked if he cou ld leave his wet oil painting at my house until the next session. We were immediately attracted to each other and within three days he had proposed marriage. Such is the artistic temperament! He had already had a checkered career as aircraft engineer, coal miner and then, as his true vocation asserted itself, designer for the theater. When we met he had worked in 33 countries around the world as designer, and was then on a five year full-time course leading to a specialist art teacher's degree. I was already teaching and we married whilst he was still a student. In the first years of our life together we spent our holidays in France. Early in the morning he would leave me bathing our small daughter and go and paint the harbor at Cannes. There he was noticed by the distinguished collector M. Henri
by Gladys Marie Smitheman Tournay who commissioned him to paint a large marine of a nineteenth century vessel for his magnificent home. This coincided with our own early sailing experiences. We progressed as a family from building our own dinghy, through chartering, to owning a yacht based on the Mediterranean, both of us earning competency certificates with the French merchant marine. Meanwhile Francis developed as a marine artist. By the late 1970s, he was painting only carefully researched large scale marines. He began to exhibit at the Royal Society of Marine Artists shows and in other London and provincial galleries, and the demand for his work grew as hi s works matured and the subjects became more challenging. A turning point in hi s development, I remember, was his painting "A Barque Being Turned by the Tug Tipper in the Newhaven Harbour." We live close to Newhaven, a South Coast port handling small freighters and the ferries running between England and France. In the nineteenth century , shipbuilding took place there in Gray's Yard and many a Newhaven craft has sai led to the Americas or the Orient. Francis is familiar with the port, sometimes going out to work
with the crabbers and often he is invited by the Tug Master to go out when there is a special towing job to be done. For this painting he carefully researched the river frontage, and .the foundations of early buildings, studied museum archives and talked with men who remembered the port as it was in the early years of this ¡ century. He then created the Newhaven painting. He told me that it was almost like a construction job, building the images of boats, wharves, the old hotel and the warehouses in their proper places and making them respond to the prevail ing light. He also experienced for the first time that sense of "being there" on the spot at that time-a feeling which has now become almost habitual. When he comes out of a long painting session it is as if he had left an earlier moment in history to rejoin our present. I have sometimes wondered about the time he spends on research si nce the result must be judged finally on artistic rather than documentary merit. He, however, rarely feels he has done enough. In 1987 he was invited to be Honoured Artist at the eighteenth Salon des Artistes In dependants at Dunkerq ue in F ranee. This an interesting concept wherein a group of artists invite a distinguished
The Flying Cloud's brush with the N. B. Palmer in the South Atlantic, July 1, 1852. Oil on canvas, 40 x 28 inches.