Study of a sailor, c. 1800

Portrait study of a sailor, Robert Williams, 1797-1812.
British Museum.

This fantastic portrait study of a sailor is a great way to compare the stereotypical sailor of a caricature and the idealized sailor of a romantic mezzotint or historical painting to real life. It was done by Philip James de Loutherbourg, the artist who painted "The Battle of the First of June, 1794", studied in the blog earlier in the month.  http://napoleonictars.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-battle-of-first-of-june-1794-1795.html

The provenance note from the British Museum states that "Robert Williams was a Yeoman of the Sheets from Virginia who was promoted to Boatswain of the Osprey sloop on 26 November 1797. (letter from Mrs Sara Cutler, 26 June 2005, in dossier)." The handwritten note at the top of the image (I don't know if it's contemporary to when the image was painted or not) reads "Robt. Williams, boatswains Mate. Venorable once Sailed with Capt. Winthorpe.

Robert Williams certainly looks like a sailor. As in a caricature his hair is short, wavy, and full, with bangs in the front, falling to his shoulders in the back. Short whiskers curl beside his ears, stopping at the lobe. He wears a single-breasted blue jacket (or possibly a coat, since the collar and single-breasted cut are different than many jackets) with one button done up.

Around his neck he wears a voluminous red handkerchief, wrapped in such a way that you can't see the ends so it looks almost like a scarf. The neckline of his sweater ends around his collarbone, showing a hint of blue and white checked shirt underneath. He looks slightly away from the viewer with an ambiguous expression - a wonderful window into what a late 18th or early 19th century sailor actually looked like.

An Irish Pilot or Steering by Chance (1812)

"An Irish Pilot, or Steering by Chance". London, 1812. Royal Museums Greenwich.

The British Navy was made up of a number of nationalities, including Welsh, Irish, and Scottish, as well as seamen from Scandinavia and America. The diversity of the lower deck provided ample fodder for caricaturists, as in my previous post about Welshmen, and this engraving entitled "Makeing a Compass at Sea or the Use of a Scotch Louse".

This English engraving from 1812 features a captain with a spyglass says, "Now en't you a pretty fellow for a Pilot? to see Land and not know where we are!", to which the pilot replies, "Och my dear Jewel! only shew me the Old head of Kinsale, and I'll tell you where to an Inch!"

The sailor on the left wears black tie shoes and white stockings, with blue striped trousers, the lacing of which can be seen at his back. He wears a short-cut blue jacket on his torso, and the sleeves of his blue and white checked shirt bell out beyond the ends of his cuffs. His brown hair is short and curly.

The Irish pilot is not a member of the ship's crew, but dresses similarly. He wears black tie shoes and white stockings, and his blue trousers are long and wide. His white waistcoat is worn unbuttoned at the top and bottom and his black handkerchief is tied tightly around his neck, the ends streaming out in the breeze. His brown jacket is worn open. On his head he wears an orange tube cap with a white brim, and from under it peeps a mass of curly brown hair.

Heaving the Lead, 1807

"Heaving the Lead". London: 1807. British Museum.

My third image from John Augustus's Atkinson's print series "A picturesque representation of the costumes of Great Britain"is one many of you might be familiar with: "Heaving the Lead". This 1807 print shows a sailor standing in the chains, using a lead line to measure the depth of the water.

The simple depiction of a sailor performing a mundane, omnipresent part of shipboard life have made this image a popular one for reuse, and it has been reproduced in numerous books covering the time period from the 18th century throughout the late 19th. Its clear composition also makes it a popular candidate for being copied by different engravers for books throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries - for example, this plate in the 1913 book "Ships and Ways of other Days".

Colored versions of this image are the most popularly-used for reproduction, so for my close analysis of  this image I'm using this copy in the collection of the British Library. The colored version also makes it clearer to see the two sailors working inboard.

"Heaving the Lead". London: 1807. British Library. 

The sailor heaving the lead wears black shoes with square white buckles. His white trousers, cut tight around the knee, are long and come down to the heels of his shoes, with a broad fall. He wears a double-breasted blue jacket worn shut, with small yellow buttons. His mariner's cuffs have three buttons, and one on his left wrist is worn undone. His neck cloth is red with white spots, tied up close to his neck with the ends hanging out. From underneath his blue jacket a checked shirt with a narrow cuff can be seen at his wrists.

On his head he wears a straw hat - far less commonly portrayed by artists than black round hats. A pipe is stuck into the band. The hat has a slightly-rounded top and a tightly-curved brim. It is of medium height, neither a low like a modern "Amish" style hat nor as tall as a "top" hat. Glimpsed under the hat is a bit of short, curly brown hair

In the background one sailor wears white trousers cut full in the lower leg and tight around the knee, with a checked shirt, a neck cloth of indiscriminate color, and a black round hat,

The other sailor wears white trousers, a blue jacket, and a black hat.

The sailor, 1792

"The Sailor". S.W. Fores, London, 1792. The Lewis Walpole Library.

Today's image is a romantic English mezzotint from 1792. The scene it portrays is from a popular story from the 1780s entitled "The Adventures of a Hackney Coach", reprinted in numerous editions in England and America throughout the end of the 18th century. A sailor (speaking in the caption in nautical jargon) hands a letter to a woman in torn clothes, while the titular hackney coach waits in the background:

Hollo!—pilot! tell that there lass with the short petticoats and tight heels to step aboard, I've got a letter from her brother for her."

"What cheer! what cheer, Nan!— what storm hast thou been in, my lass, thy rigging seems a little tattered and yet thy bottom is tight and clean?"

"The storm of adversity, says the poor girl—"O,—an' that be all, here is what will set thee to rights speedily, my girl;" pulling a dirty letter from his pocket.—She read it, and found it contained an order on her brother's owner for ten pounds.

Our sailor wears pointed-toe shoes with square white-metal buckles and red and white striped trousers that end at the ankle showing white socks. On his upper body a white waistcoat with a few buttons undone at the top combined with a tightly-tied voluminous black handkerchief shows a blue and white checked shirt beneath. His long blue jacket has short tails that reach to his thighs, with seven large yellow metal buttons up the front. A large gold fob hangs from a wide green ribbon at his waist, and he carries a stick in one hand. 


His hat reminds me of one from The Flowing Can (1791), as it is bound around the brim and the base of the crown with what looks like yellow tape. His long brown hair flows down to his shoulders.

The Battle of Trafalgar, JMW Turner, 1806

JMW Turner;
The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory;
© Tate Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported),
The original can be at the Tate viewed by clicking here.

Today Napoleonic Tars celebrates the 211th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar with its first foray into the medium of oil on canvas: J.M.W. Turner's "The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory". This painting shows the moment of Nelson's fall, the officers and men who rushed to support him, the wounded Lieutenant Pasco being carried from the deck, and the sniper in the French top firing.

The battle - and specific subjects such as the death of Lord Nelson - was a frequent subject of artists in the 19th century, but Turner's 1806 work is one of the earlier large-scale paintings and a good place to begin looking at how artists portrayed the clothing English sailors wore in the battle.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was a prolific English Romantic landscape painter who is also well known for his nautical scenes such as "The Fighting Temeraire" and "The Slave Ship". Turned painted the Battle of Trafalgar twice, first in 1806 and again in 1824. Both paintings depart from the historical events; the 1806 painting simultaneously combines the flash of the sniper's muzzle in the French top with Nelson having already turned and fallen. Despite this inaccuracy, the Tate's caption of the 1806 painting notes,

Turner made close observation of the ships shown here, but the painting of the battle in which Admiral Nelson died is not simply detailed reportage. Sails and cannon smoke arrest the eye, creating a claustrophobic backdrop, while the action appears to thrust outwards. The viewer is confronted by both the chaos of battle and the intimate tragedy of Nelson’s final moments. A contemporary reviewer termed this a ‘British epic picture...the first picture of the kind that has ever...been exhibited’.

The Tate's catalogue entry also quotes The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner" (Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll. New Haven and London: 1984)

Turner made a special trip to sketch the Victory as she entered the Medway and subsequently made a large number of detailed studies on board the ship in the ‘Nelson’ sketchbook (LXXXIX). There are also two larger studies of the deck of the Victory in the British Museum (CXX-c, and the Vaughan Bequest CXXI-S, repr. exh. cat. R.A. 1974, p. 60 no. 96).  Farington recorded on 3 June 1806 that ‘Turner's I went to and saw His picture of the Battle of Trafalgar. It appeared to me to be a very crude, unfinished performance, the figures miserably bad.’   

Perhaps because he had been so keen to show the picture as soon as possible after the event Turner seems to have felt the need to work on it further before exhibiting it again in 1808. According to the writer, probably John Landseer, of a long review in the Review of Publications of Art for 1808, ‘The picture appears more powerful both in respect of chiaroscuro and colour than when we formerly saw it in Mr. Turner's gallery, and has evidently been since revised and very much improved by the author’. Describing the picture as ‘a British epic picture’ the writer called it ‘the first picture of the kind that has ever, to our knowledge, been exhibited’. ‘Mr. Turner ... has detailed the death of his hero, while he has suggested the whole of a great naval victory, which we believe has never before been successfully accomplished, if it has been before attempted, in a single picture.’ 

Whatever the painting may have looked like originally, its 1808 rework leaves it a striking scene that captures the feel of a critical moment in the battle. Turner's treatment of the moment stands in contrast to the other more intimate historic paintings of fallen heroes that he would have been familiar with, such as West's The Death of General Wolfe (1770) and Copley's The Death of Major Pierson (1783), and in even starker contrast to West's 1806 painting of the death of Lord Nelson and Devis's 1807 treatment of the same subject. All these paintings place the death of their hero - Nelson or otherwise - at the center of the action, whereas Turner's portrayal of the death of Lord Nelson is almost more in line with Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: an important moment lost in a larger world.

The ongoing battle consumes much of the frame of the painting, as the visual confusion of smoke, distance, and the towering spars and masts of multiple ships obscures Nelson's fall - so much that the painting was criticized by a contemporary for being about mere "shipping" instead of the "MURDER" of a national hero.

The scale of Turner's painting makes it difficult to distinguish the figures on Victory's deck, and Turner’s particular arrangement of the figures on deck is an imaginary reconstruction. Fortunately for us his exhibit key to the painting survives.

JMW Turner; Key to
'The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory';
© Tate Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported),
The original can be viewed at the Tate by clicking here.

Two of the men are identified as sailors, namely "1. ‘Marshall’ [John Marshall, Able Seaman or William Marshall, Ordinary Seaman. Poop deck, kneeling to left of the flag in left foreground]" and "3. ‘Marshall Signals Man’ [see 1 above, or another John, Able Seaman. Poop deck, holding flag rope]." Turner's quick sketch also gives us an artist's quick impression of the essence of a sailor, which comes as no surprise: blue jackets and round hats.

Detail from JMW Turner's Key to 
'The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory'; 
© Tate Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported),
The original can be viewed at the Tate by clicking here.

Detail from JMW Turner's Key to 
'The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory'; 
© Tate Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported),
The original can be viewed at the Tate by clicking here.

David Blayney Brown, ‘Key to ‘The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory’ 1806 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 2006, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-key-to-the-battle-of-trafalgar-as-seen-from-the-mizen-r1139293, accessed 20 October 2016.

Detail from JMW Turner's The Battle of Trafalgar... 
© Tate Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), 
The original can be at the Tate viewed by clicking here.

Despite its scale the finished painting shows some fascinating glimpses of the sailors on Victory's deck. In this detail a sailor on the left with his back to the viewer wears a straw hat with a dark ribbon around the base of the crown, a long, thick queue that falls to his shoulder blades, and a checked shirt. Helping him is another man, bare-headed with shirt hair, and also in a checked shirt. A bare-headed kneeling man with short hair identified in Turner's key as an able seaman wears a blue jacket and trousers with black shoes. A man with his hand on a crate wears a straw hat and black jacket with a lighter-colored garment beneath. Other figures in the background that may be sailors wear queues, shirts without waistcoats, and blue jackets.

Detail from JMW Turner's The Battle of Trafalgar... 
© Tate Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), 
The original can be at the Tate viewed by clicking here.

In this detail a bareheaded sailor on the right bends over; he also wears a checked shirt. A small kneeling figure by the mast with his back to the viewer may be a sailor; he wears a round hat with a queue.

In 1805 Turner filled a sketchbook with drawings from life of Victory and Temeraire, along with studies of officers, sailors, and marines; these drawings became the basis for his painting. Stay tuned for Monday, when I'll be looking at Turner's sketches of sailors from Victory. Also stay tuned for next Friday, when I'll compare and contrast Turner's 1806 painting to his 1824 treatment of the Battle of Trafalgar.

The sailor and long-back'd horse, 1797

"[The sailor and long-back'd horse]". Richard Newton, [England, 1797?].
Lewis Walpole Library.

This colored engraving is a caricature of a sailor being shown a horse by two grooms. The sailor carries a stick and has a white clay pipe tucked into his black round hat. His striped white and red trousers end several inches above his ankles, showing his white stockings and the oval buckles on his black pointed toe shoes.
The print colorist has portrayed his red waistcoat as having red cloth buttons. The buttons of his blue jacket are not visible. The jacket and waistcoat are worn open, showing a checked blue and white shirt and a loosely-tied black handkerchief that trails down slightly onto his back. Under his hat the sailor has short, curly brown hair.