19th-Century European Art
19th-Century European Art
Property of a Private US Collection
Cutty Sark and Thermopylae
Live auction begins on:
February 5, 07:00 PM GMT
Estimate
80,000 - 120,000 USD
Bid
55,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Property of a Private US Collection
Montague Dawson
British 1890 - 1973
Cutty Sark and Thermopylae
signed lower left: Montague.Dawson
oil on canvas
canvas: 24 by 36 in.; 61 by 91.4 cm
framed: 29 ½ by 41 ¾ in.; 74.9 by 106 cm
With Daniel Rees Fine Art Dealer, Jackson, Michigan;
From whom acquired by the present owner.
Montague Dawson's dramatic scene at sea centers on two famed clipper ships, Cutty Sark and Thermopylae, both of which he painted several times.
Arguably the most well-known tea and wool clipper, and the only still in existence today, the Cutty Sark was famously fast. Built at Dumbarton in 1869 by Scott & Linton and completed by Denny Bros., she was first launched on November 23, 1869. Initially the Cutty Sark transported tea from Shanghai to London, with her fastest voyage recorded in the winter of 1870, in which she traveled from London to Shanghai in ninety-eight days. With the opening of the Suez Canal and the subsequent domination of the China tea trade by steamers in the 1880s, the Cutty Sark relocated to the fast-growing Australian wool trade. It was on this route that the Cutty Sark’s reputation for speed became world-renowned, with her fastest trip recorded as seventy-three days between Sydney and London in October 1885. Following World War I, she was brought home for restoration in 1922, and eventually moved to her custom-built dry dock in Greenwich in 1954, where she can still be visited as a museum ship and part of the National Historic Fleet today.
Among the most illustrious of all the China tea trade clippers, Thermopylae was designed by Bernard Waymouth and built for George Thompson & Co. of London by Walter Hood at Aberdeen in 1868. Registered at 947 tons (net) and measuring 212 feet in length with a 36 foot beam, she was a splendid sea boat, fast in any weather and especially quick when going to windward. Launched on 19th August 1868, she sailed from Gravesend on her maiden voyage to Melbourne on 7th November the same year. Anchoring in Port Phillip, Australia, after a record run of 60 days (pilot to pilot), she went straight on to Newcastle, New South Wales, to load cargo for Shanghai. Crossing the Pacific in another record passage of 28 days, she then proceeded to Foochow to load tea. In the race home, she narrowly missed setting the record time for the year and this first voyage set the standard for her entire career. Continuing to make extremely fast passages throughout the 1870s, she loaded her final tea cargo at Foochow in 1881 before being transferred into the Australian wool trade where, during the 1880s, she frequently paced her old tea-trade rival Cutty Sark from Sydney to London, via Cape Horn. Her best passage was 76 days in 1882 although Cutty Sark, which reveled in the stronger winds of the southern hemisphere, was generally quicker.
In 1890 the justly famous Thermopylae was sold to Canadian owners for 5000 and, from 1892-1895, was employed in the trans-Pacific trade. In 1896 she was resold to the Portuguese Government, renamed Pedro Nunes and put to work as a cadet training ship. Her condition deteriorated steadily however and, by 1907, her working life was over. On 13th October that year, she was towed out of the Tagus into the open sea, offered as a target and sunk by naval gunfire; it was a sad end for such a thoroughbred. Considered by many experts to have been the fastest clipper of them all, some even believed her to be the fastest commercial sailing vessel ever launched.