MARINE ART
The English town of "Beer, A View ofthe ChalkCliffs ,Looking East," by John Stobart, oil on canvas, 12" x 16"
Sandra Heaphy, John Stobart's lively aide and endlessly patient business manager, about a few dates in the artist's career and also to secure the photos of the paintings that illuminate this report. I had been in the studio before, but this time I had my Sherlock Holmesian glasses on. I have always agreed with the
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idea that you can tell more about a person by the books he keeps handy on hi s shelves than almost anything else. So I romped through John 's library while awaiting his arrival. It was Old Home Week , beginning with MacGregor's Merchant Sailing Ships, a classic in its field. Next to thi s stood
Underhill's Masting and Rigging, another classic. And there was Fred Way 's Packet Directory, listing the steamboats that plied the Ohio, Mississippi and Mi ssouri river systems, in a culture that Stobart has entered into as full y as he has into the sagas and lore of the sailing deepwatermen. Oh, and here was Irving Johnson 's Peking Battles Cape Horn, published by our Sea Hi story Press, sandwiched between two quite di ss imilar classics, the late Gordon Thomas 's Fast and Able, an account of the Gloucester fishing schooners which he grew up with but was forbidden to sail in due to the loss of lifeamongfami ly members in that sternly demanding trade; and on the right T. H. White's England Have My Bones, a personal memoir of the vanishing yeoman England which the author of The Sword in the Stone and The Ill-Made Knight wrote to record its ways in unsentimental but highly evocative prose. I paused at Samuel Eliot Mori son 's Maritime History of Massachusetts, in wh ich in the earl y 1920s he flung down the gauntlet to challenge general historians with the largely overlooked maritime dynamics which built the Bay Colony and ultimately America-the work of a real sailorman who was as close to the rockbound ports and twi sting channels that led Americans to sea from the places they ' d come ashore as T. H. White was to hi s English hedgerows and the country lanes down which the yeoman archers marched to win at Crecy and Agincourt. And I practically lost myself, not for the first time, in Mary Black's marvelously evocative Old New York In Early Photographs. How I wish that blithe spirit, since departed this earth, had consul ted with someone who knew the salt water side of her storied city, a city washed by the diurnal Atlantic tides. I had reached thi s point in turning the pages of these well-thumbed books when John burst into the room with a young artist in tow, Bill Suys, Jr. of Racine, Wi sconsin. The two men paused just a moment to look out at Boston Harbor, where sailboats were racing in the damp, shadowed evening light. John then seized the original oil painting of Michael Karas' s "Spring Creek" (reproduced here SEA HISTORY 67, AUTUMN 1993