.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Although the identity of these two whalers is unknown, their portrayal by Robert Dodd indicates that they were almost certainly London-based vessels operating out of the Thames from where the largest British whaling fleet emanated until well into the nineteenth century. By the mid-eighteenth century, the shortage of Arctic whales was already sending the whaling fleets as far away as Greenland, hence the term the 'Greenland Whale Fishery', and the fact that the Howland Great Wet Dock at Rotherhithe - built at the end of the seventeenth century - was, in 1763, renamed the Greenland Dock when it was purchased by John and William Wells who also built blubber storehouses and oil tanks for the burgeoning industry.
In 1783, after a wartime depression in the British whaling industry caused primarily by the number of whalers commandeered by the government for use as transports, the trade soon began to revive after the peace settlement with both France and the infant United States. Likewise, an increase in the government whaling bounty to forty shillings (£2) per ton was an added incentive to put more vessels into this extremely lucrative trade which paid out a total of £27,017 12s. 6d. to forty-seven English whaling ships in the year 1783. In fact, this was such a marked increase on the previous year, when the American War of Independence was still in full spate, that it seems entirely plausible that this painting was commissioned simply to mark the general return to prosperity rather than any specific whaling expedition.
As if further to promote this latter theory, it is not without interest that this painting was twice engraved and published, on the first occasion by John & Josiah Boydell of Cheapside in 1789 and again in 1795, by Fran. Ambrosi and Antoine Suntach. Two separate printings would suggest a strong popular demand amongst whaling ship owners, masters and crews, for whom a generic image would perhaps be rather more attractive than one of vessels belonging to their rivals. Both engravings are illustrated in the volume of Prints [from the Kendall Whaling Museum] by M.V. & Dorothy Brewington, published in Sharon, Massachusetts, in 1969, p.49, no. 151 and p. 60, no. 189.
In 1783, after a wartime depression in the British whaling industry caused primarily by the number of whalers commandeered by the government for use as transports, the trade soon began to revive after the peace settlement with both France and the infant United States. Likewise, an increase in the government whaling bounty to forty shillings (£2) per ton was an added incentive to put more vessels into this extremely lucrative trade which paid out a total of £27,017 12s. 6d. to forty-seven English whaling ships in the year 1783. In fact, this was such a marked increase on the previous year, when the American War of Independence was still in full spate, that it seems entirely plausible that this painting was commissioned simply to mark the general return to prosperity rather than any specific whaling expedition.
As if further to promote this latter theory, it is not without interest that this painting was twice engraved and published, on the first occasion by John & Josiah Boydell of Cheapside in 1789 and again in 1795, by Fran. Ambrosi and Antoine Suntach. Two separate printings would suggest a strong popular demand amongst whaling ship owners, masters and crews, for whom a generic image would perhaps be rather more attractive than one of vessels belonging to their rivals. Both engravings are illustrated in the volume of Prints [from the Kendall Whaling Museum] by M.V. & Dorothy Brewington, published in Sharon, Massachusetts, in 1969, p.49, no. 151 and p. 60, no. 189.