Skip to main content

Blossom’s License

March 2023
1min read

Robert Uhl’s article on Christopher Blossom and the new generation of American marine artists (February/March 1985) brings to mind an important point that I like to emphasize with artists who attempt to portray real ships and waterfront scenes: They are no less responsible for their accuracy than are model-makers and authors. If they intend to depict a specific scene or ship, I say they are obliged to research their subject as would an author of a book or the builder of a model. Not all do, although many are very much aware of this and really do their homework.

Speaking of such, Blossom’s painting of the Ardnamurchan entering Port Blakely harbor certainly catches the spirit of the year 1903 and the Puget Sound shoreline. But he shows the sawmill much too clearly from the ship’s position. The mill lay way back up in the bay, past the recently abandoned shipyard of the Hall Brothers, which was to the right, and closer to the entrance or wider neck of the bay. From the ship’s position on the sound, you cannot see the sawmill at all. The lofty skysail yarder he shows in the distance, stern to the dock and bows pointed out, could be the German 4mbk [four-masted bark] Wandsbek . While the bones of this vessel now lie off the breakwater in Santa Rosalia, Mexico, the wheel hangs in the tween deck of the museum ship Balclutha in San Francisco.

And I get the clear impression from the other Blossom paintings shown that the main, fore, and crojack yards are much too high above the deck. But opportunities for error are endless, and one shouldn’t kick too much.


Robert Uhl replies : True, the Ardnamurchan’s lower yards do seem a mite high. Since she was headed into a lumber port, could that have been deliberate, to allow space for deck loads? When my ships (steamships) carried deck cargo, a lot of uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous adjustments had to be made. At first I thought Ardnamurchan had pole masts, but a photo in Tall Ships of Puget Sound shows her with conventional lower, topmast, topgallant, et cetera.

Christopher Blossom agrees you are right about the sawmill and pleads guilty to possible oversimplification. Still, painters like Turner, Homer, Whistler, and their ilk exercised artistic license in background detail to include an interesting structure or feature, improve composition, or give depth to a painting.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "June/july 1985"

Authored by: Geoffrey C. Ward

Have historians underestimated the importance of Roosevelt’s twenty-four-year struggle with the disease that made him a paraplegic?

Authored by: The Editors

In 1983 our country went to war and left the press behind. The outcry that followed raised issues that first came up when Abraham Lincoln was President and still remain with us.

Authored by: Stephen W. Sears

The Civil War ignited the basic conflict between a free press and the need for military security. By war’s end, the hard-won compromises between soldiers and newspapermen may not have provided all the answers, but they had raised all the modern questions.

Authored by: John Chancellor

A veteran reporter looks back to a time when the stakes were really high — and yet military men actually trusted newsmen.

Authored by: Joseph H. Cooper

Westmoreland and Sharon embarked on costly lawsuits to justify their battlefield judgments. They might have done much better to listen to Mrs. William Tecumseh Sherman.

Authored by: Brian Dunning

The curious story of Milford Haven

Authored by: Brian Dunning

The curious story of Milford Haven

Authored by: Ruth Mehrtens Calvin

His works ranged from intimate cameos to heroic public monuments. America has produced no greater sculptor.

Authored by: Elting E. Morison

A lot of people still remember how great it was to ride in the old Pullmans, how curiously regal to have a simple, well-cooked meal in the dining car. Those memories are perfectly accurate—and that lost pleasure holds a lesson for us that extends beyond mere nostalgia.

Authored by: Peggy Robbins

Slovenly, impulsive, impoverished, and grotesque, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque was the greatest naturalist of his age. But nobody knew it.

Featured Articles

Famous writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts turned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery into our country’s first conservation project.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.

Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.

Born during Jim Crow, Belle da Costa Greene perfected the art of "passing" while working for one of the most powerful men in America.