Nationalmuseum Gripsholm Castle opens for the season

A grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation has allowed the National Maritime Museum (NMM) to make part of its considerable collection of prints and drawings available online for the first time. The NMM’s collections comprise over 70,000 prints and drawings, including a large number of little-known sketchbooks and albums.

Neptune Court Facade. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

The newly digitized drawings, mainly produced by Royal Navy officers in the 18th and 19th centuries, give us a glimpse of tropical islands, exotic cities and indigenous peoples at a time when the ability to draw a landscape was not just a pastime but also a means of intelligence gathering.

Highlights from material recently added to the NMM’s online collection include:

Over 100 working sketches by marine painter to George IV, William IV and Queen Victoria, John Christian Schetky (1778–1874).
An album of drawings made by Gabriel Bray (d. 1823) recording his voyage as second lieutenant of HMS Pallas to West Africa in 1775.
A remarkable collection of over 100 watercolours from albums by the now little-remembered Admiral Sir Edward Gennys Fanshawe (1814–1906), covering his service in the Pacific from 1849–52, in the Baltic during the Crimean War, and in the Mediterranean.
Already familiar to maritime specialists, Schetky and Bray’s works (acquired in 1991) are very rare drawings of everyday shipboard life in the age of Cook and Nelson as well as some unique depictions of street-life ashore.

The far less well known Fanshawe was an amateur artist who recorded his varied and distinguished career with a skilled hand in highly finished watercolours. The journeys depicted include an investigative diplomatic voyage during which he visited Pitcairn, where he met Susan Young, who had left Tahiti with the Bounty mutineers. Fanshawe heard first-hand the account of how she killed the last male Tahitian with an axe during the island’s conflict; Fiji, where he drew what are possibly the earliest portraits of Seru Thakombau, founder of the modern state of Fiji; and Samoa, where his drawings of women show the enduring influence of English fashions on their ‘Sunday-best’ costume. Fanshawe’s travels also took him to California two years into the 1849 gold rush, the Pacific coasts of Panama and Mexico, Chile, Brazil, the Falkland Islands, the Gulf of Finland, Lisbon, Malta, Italy, western Greece and the Tunisian coast – all captured in his drawings which are still in superb condition, thanks to being preserved in the albums in which he later arranged them

Also available online for the first time are volumes by: Lieutentant (later Captain) George Pechell Mends of HMS Trafalgar 1853–54, at home and in the Mediterranean in the run-up to the Crimean War; Lieutenant James Henry Butt on a surveying voyage on the coasts of China, Formosa (Taiwan) and western Japan in 1866–70; and the Revd Thomas Streatfield (1777–1848) who appears to have been a passenger on a cross-Channel packet where he recorded the humour, discomfort and tedium of shipboard life in a 31-page sketchbook.

National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London SE10 9NF

The prints, along with commentary, can be accessed at: http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/explore

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