 Clipper Ship Lightning on Pacific Rollers Oil painting on canvas Canvas size: 30 x 40" Provenance: The Darvish Collection Gallery of Fine Art, Naples, Florida $3,500 framed  |
James Brereton was born in Derby, England in 1954. He received his basic art training at the Derby Joseph Wright Art School. He works mainly in oils and specialises in marine subjects, his favourite subjects being deep water sailing ships of the nineteenth century. His work has been influenced by artists such as Montague Dawson and Thomas Somerscales. His love of ships and the sea emanate from having lived by the sea on the south coast of England. His other works include coastal scenes, still life, townscapes, figurative and some landscape. Brereton's work is recorded and illustrated in Denys Brook Hart’s book “20th Century British Marine Painting” and E.H.H. Archibald’s “Dictionary of Sea Painters of Europe and America”. He has exhibited at the Royal Society of Marine Artists in London and West End, as well as many galleries throughout England. His paintings are to be found in private collections throughout the world. |
| When Lightning was built in 1854 in Boston,
America's clipper boom was on the wane. The Australian
gold rush was on, however, and Bostonian Donald McKay
was building ships for James Baines of the Black Ball
Line in Liverpool. Baines needed to transport passengers
and cargo to Australia and had been impressed by the
huge American ships. Lightning was powerfully and heavily constructed to handle the heavy seas and storms of the Australian run. Only the finest materials went into her construction. She cost £30,000 to build, and Baines put in another £2,000 in interior decoration, adding fine woods, marble, gilding and stained glass. It is said that her rooms rivaled those of the later Queen Mary. An on-ship newspaper called the Lightning Gazette was published for the passengers and crew. Dimensions were 226 x 44 x 26 feet with tonnage of 2,084 tons. After arriving in England, Lightning's hollow bow was ignorantly filled in by her captain Anthony Enright. McKay called the people who did it "the wood butchers of Liverpool". When the famous James "Bully" Forbes became her captain, he drove her mercilessly, often running with the lee rail underwater, and the fillings soon washed out. Lightning began to set records. She crossed from New York to Liverpool in 13 days, 19½ hours, and she sailed 436 nautical miles in 24 hours, doing 18 to 18½ knots. In 1854–55, she made the passage from Melbourne to Liverpool in 65 days, completing a circumnavigation of the world in 5 months, 9 days, which included 20 days spent in port. Lightning did a brief stint as a troop ship, taking British soldiers from England to India (in 87 days) to fight the 1857 Indian Mutiny. In 1867, she was purchased by Thomas Harrison of Liverpool. On 30 October 1869, Lightning caught fire at Geelong (near Melbourne) in Australia, when she was fully loaded and ready to sail with 4,300 bales of wool, 200 tons of copper, 35 casks of wine, and some tallow. Attempts to control the fire were unsuccessful, so the decision was taken to sink her. She was towed out to the shoals in Corio Bay where initial attempts to hole her below the waterline with cannon fire from the shore were unsuccessful. Some of the crew scuttled her by cutting holes on the waterline, and she sank in 27 feet of water. The shoals became known as "Lightning Shoals".” Source: Wikipedia. More here. |
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