Sea Horses of Icy Cape, 1790 (British Tars)

Today's post is shared with permission from British Tars: 1740-1790:

Sea Horses of Icy Cape, M. Brown, 1790, John Carter Brown Library.

"Taken from the book Captain Cook's Voyages Round the World, this engraving depicts a group of tars laying fire into a tightly packed group of walruses (here named "sea horses") in Alaska. Setting aside the humorous expressions on the faces of the seamen and the walruses, we'll dive right in to examining the seamen's clothes.

All of our tars wear plain trousers and close fit short jackets. For those who have their backs turned to us, we see their jackets are without vents or cuffs. The oarsmen amidships show that the jackets have white lapels, and one of them has matching white mariner's cuffs. Though most are without hats, a pair (at the least) wear knit caps, and one rather tall man in the back wears a round hat bound in tape and turned up on one side. It is possible the hat is turned up on both sides, but the perspective here only allows us to speculate."

Calm, 1812 (JMW Turner)

JMW Turner; Calm
© Tate Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported),
The original can be viewed at the Tate by clicking here.
1812

I don't mean to turn this into the JMW Turner Draws Men On Boats Blog or a study of fishermen's clothing - though the notions have a certain appeal - but once again a great print from Turner's "Liber Studiorum" pulled me back. In it fishermen drift on a glassy sea, their spread sails hanging limply. The aquatint/mezzotint process and warm ink gives the scene considerable depth, with the boats in the background shown in lighter tones, while the fishermen appear almost black.

Detail from JMW Turner's "Calm"
©Tate Photographic Rights ©Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported),
The original can be viewed at the Tate by clicking here.
1812

I haven't seen any knit caps in the artwork I've been studying so far (largely caricatures from 1797-1807, so a fairly limited slice of nautical art, to be fair), so the cap in "Marine Dabblers" and today's print have stuck out. The waterman's long queue is striking as well.

The unusual clothing and the contents of the rest of the Liber Studiorum make me suspect that this might be a painting of continental fishermen and thus perhaps not appropriate to include with the rest of my English-speaking sailor content, so I'm not tagging it in with everything else and am including using it as an end-of-the-month "outside the usual subject matter" posts.