A Thick Night Off the Goodwins, from "Illustrated London News"
Mason Jackson|Lionel Percy Smythe
December 4, 1869 · Wood engraving · Drawings and Prints
This print shows a sailor in wet weather gear and bearded companion intensely studying a chart below decks, as a woman nurses a baby and a kettle tips dangerously on a stove--the Goodwins are dangerous shoals off the east coast of Kent. Smythe, a painter of landscape and rustic genre had begun exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1863 and Jackson's wood engraving reproduces a work he showed there in 1869. The subject had been suggested by an article in the periodical "Household Words." As he worked out the composition, Smythe consulted with his stepbrother, the marine painter William Lionel Wyllie, made studies in a schooner on the Thames, and had a sloping platform constructed in his family's house in London. Smythe's watercolor version of the subject is now at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
- Artist
- Mason Jackson|Lionel Percy Smythe
- Date
- December 4, 1869
- Medium
- Wood engraving
- Department
- Drawings and Prints
- Credit line
- Gift of Donato Esposito, 2013