Follower of Dominic Serres

Probably art market, Biarritz;

Where acquired by Camille Berghmans Macalester de Pedroso and José de Pedroso, Marquis de San Carlos (b. 1917);

Thence by descent to their son, José Luis de Pedroso;

Thence by inheritance to his wife, Charlotte Worthen de Pedroso (d. 2009), Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and Northeast Harbor, Maine;

Thence by descent to the present collector.

This elegant seascape painted circa 1798 features the U.S.S. Constitution, a three-masted wooden-hulled frigate and world's oldest ship to remain afloat. It launched in Boston Harbor in October 1797 and this painting almost certainly commemorates its first trip to the Caribbean, undertaken in July 1798. The ship flies the Betsy Ross flag, featuring thirteen white stars arranged in a circular pattern, which also aids in the painting's precise dating as soon thereafter, when Vermont and Kentucky joined the Union, the fifteen-star and fifteen-stripe flag (that inspired Francis Scott Key's "Star-Spangled Banner") went into use.

The as-yet unidentified artist drew on the pictorial precedent of Dominic Serres, who in the late 1760s produced a series of fourteen paintings depicting Havana for the Keppel family. Those works, commemorating the sea battles of the Seven Years War, in which members of the Keppel family fought, were almost immediately disseminated as prints, thereby popularizing this type of marine painting.

Exactly where in the Caribbean the scene in the present painting transpires remains opaque, but the crenelated tower that defines the silhouette of the scarped bastion at right is practically unique in fortification design in the Americas at the turn of the eighteenth century .