The John Stobart Project – Chapter 7 – Finishing the Black Schooner
The painting (above) as it was last touched by John, now on my easel here in Mystic.
Finishing a John Stobart Painting
I am deeply honored to have been asked by John Stobart’s widow (and head of the Stobart Foundation) to finish a painting of South Street (at his request) he was unable to complete before his passing early this year. I will be regularly chronicling my progress finishing the piece using John’s notes, research, methods and materials in a series of blog posts, below:
As discussed in previous chapters, John’s vision for this painting is a scene from 1884 on South Street in New York, along the piers immediately south of the newly-opened Brooklyn Bridge. Looking at the painting as he left it (above) you can see, from left to right, the paddle steamer SAPPHO, a three-masted downeaster, a two-masted, black-hulled schooner, a three-masted coastal schooner with another just behind it, and what looks like a barge, though that is just roughly smudged in.
I picked this project back up last week, after setting it aside for another, and in this installment show you how I have finished the black schooner, after having tackled the Brooklyn waterfront, bridge, and downeaster in previous sessions. The black ship in the foreground is obviously a typical coastal schooner, wide-beamed, built as a workhorse for the eastern seaboard. There’s good reference in John’s volume of “Maritime New York in Nineteenth Century Photographs” as well as much to find in the way of pictures and models in a Google search. So, filling in what I assumed John would have done, I added rigging, bow sprit, doused headsails, figures, horses, bollards (with the correct pier number), etc., etc.
It is astonishing to me how much rigging john painted in his lifetime — heck, its astonishing how much there is IN JUST THIS PAINTING. And the schooner in the foreground is superimposed on top of the three-masted downeaster, itself with a jungle of standing and running rigging. And if you look closely at many of John’s paintings of ships, not only is every line seemingly accounted for, but each one has a shadow side and a highlight side! I’ve done my best, but the man must have possesed superhuman patience. I also did not want to begin to paint over the downeaster’s shiny copper-sheathed hull until I was certain builders were still using this practice in the mid-1880s, as my further research (and help from Mr. Demers and Mr. Blossom) revealed.
Below you can compare ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots:
And here are a couple of detail shots, before and after:
And two more, before and after:
If you have comments or suggestions, please let me know by dropping me an e-mail at russ@russkramer.com and thanks for your interest!
