WILLIAM CLARK OF GREENOCK (SCOTTISH, 1803-1883) The full-rig...

Estimate

£3,000 - £5,000

WILLIAM CLARK OF GREENOCK (SCOTTISH, 1803-1883)

The full-rigged screw steamer 'Queen of the Thames' outward bound and passing the Bishop Rock lighthouse

Signed and dated 'W Clark 1870' (lower left)

Oil on canvas

27 x 44in. (68.5 x 112.5cm.)

Sotheby's London: Marine Pictures and Nautical Works of Art, 3 May 1995, lot 56.

The iron screw steamer Queen of the Thames was built on the Clyde by Robert Napier at Govan and launched on 11^th August 1870. Registered at 2,618 tons gross and measuring 322½ feet in length with a 20½ foot beam, her first owners were Devitt & Moore et al and should have had a fine career ahead of her on the London to Melbourne run had fate not intervened. On 18^th February 1871, she left Melbourne for her maiden passage home carrying 250 passengers and 110 crew, and a mixed cargo which also included 2,500ozs. of gold (worth £10,000 at the time). Just a month later, on 17^th March, she ran ashore and broke her back on a reef off Struys Bay, east of Cape Town. Although four crew were lost, all others aboard, plus the gold she was carrying, were saved, as was most of the other cargo shortly afterwards. The ship herself however, said by many to have been “the finest vessel ever to sail out of the Thames”, was a total wreck and heavy seas destroyed most of her within a year.

Heavy overpainting to bottom edge, scattered retouching and retouching throughout the sea, old relining.