Last night's disaster

In his preview of the Royal Academy exhibition of 1890 F.G. Stephens wrote that ''Last Night’s Disaster,’ indicates the subsidence of a terrible storm upon a sandy coast [....]. A fisherman’s boat has been tossed high upon a sandbank the tempest has piled in the foreground, far beyond the usual reach of the waves. Receding now, the billows of the pale glass-green ocean, dashed with foam, still beat so furiously upon the shore that the spectator seems almost to hear the sullen thunder with which their regular fall breaks the hoarse murmur which is the burden of the sea’s angry music. Brilliant sunlight pervades the scene, and lights up the crests of the nearer waves, but makes still blacker the fragments of the storm-clouds that fly in the upper air before the remnant of the gale, and between whose masses blue gaps and white vapours lined with pallid green are rapidly forming. Far off, a lonely schooner, reeling in the wind, is just distinguishable against the greenish sky of the horizon as seen between two wave crest. Near the front, aloft upon the sandy hillock, the black boat lies conspicuous, half filled with sand. There is a great hole in her side, through which the sunlight penetrates. Labouring near her bow are two men, one of whom is digging a channel along which she may be dragged to the sea again, while the other places a prop to prevent her from falling too soon. On the top of the hillock a comely girl, in a russet, rose, and brown dress, is digging with a long spade. The hollows and heaps of the sand and all the foresea glitter in the sun.'

Christie's are grateful to Juliet McMasters for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.