Maine and the Sea: 50 Years of Collecting at Maine Maritime Museum

In honor of Maine Maritime Museum's 50th Anniversary, Curator Emeritus Nathan R. Lipfert and Trustee Emeritus Charles E. Burden gathered together one hundred of the museum's most significant objects for a 2012 exhibition and corresponding catalogue. We have selected paintings from that exhibit to share with you here. Included are excerpts from Lipfert and Burden that detail how these objects came to Maine Maritime Museum. This selection represents some of the highlights of the over 21,500 objects in Maine Maritime Museum's collection.

Captain Moses Owen was part owner of a number of vessels built by Levi Houghton and commanded several of them. He was born in Topsham, Maine, about 1783, and had apparently risen to the level of mate by 1806. At that time he acquired a quadrant, a pilot book, and a blank journal and undertook studying the art of navigation. He is listed as captain of a number of Kennebec vessels over the next few years.  In 1819 Moses Owen became first captain of the first Houghton vessel, Bolton. He made several passages between the Azores and Philadelphia between 1820 and 1822 and sat for this portrait during a layover at the latter port. The artist, James Peale (1749-1831), was a member of a prominent family of Philadelphia artists. He specialized in miniatures through the 1790s and early 1800s, but with some weakening of his vision he turned to painting large portraits and still-lifes by the time he executed this painting of Capt. Moses Owen. This portrait was purchased by the museum with funds donated by Elizabeth Noyce.

This clipper was built in 1851 at South Portland, Maine, by Alford Butler, the same yard that built Snow Squall a few months earlier. Painted by James Edward Buttersworth around 1852, this painting differs from many ship portraits, which often represent the same vessel as seen from different points of view. In this case, however, the details of the two ships are different, and the painting is almost certainly made to document the chance close encounter of two ships in mountainous seas off Cape Horn. The crew on watch aboard each vessel can be seen grouped forward of the foremast (a common place of shelter for the watch), regarding the other vessel. Of more than 20,000 vessels built in Maine, only 89 are believed to have been true clippers – sailing vessels of extreme design built for speed. Paintings of them are so rare that when this one became available through Terry Geaghan, a local dealer in ship paintings, even though the price was high, we asked benefactor Betty Noyce to buy it for us. And she did.  

The painting of the ship Leonora shows her at the Macabi Islands. Like the well known Chinchas Islands 450 miles to the southwes, ocean currents there are particularly favorable for a high yield of fish and they experience miniscule amounts of rainfall year-round. Seabirds abound, snapping up the fish and defecating as they fly over the islands. After hundreds of years with no rain to wash away the drying excrement, the product piled up, a couple hundred feet high. Once its great value as a fertilizer was realized, this product, called guano, became a worthwhile cargo for vessels to carry around Cape Horn to ports in Europe and the Eastern United States. Guano was a miserable cargo to obtain and load. The Peruvian government was difficult to deal with; the guano was mined by harshly-treated workers from China who were lured there by promises of riches; there were long waits before a ship’s turn to load; and the vessels were inundated with the pungent dust of dried bird droppings during loading. But when a vessel had no other paying cargo available to carry on a return trip from the West Coast it was better than nothing. The ship Leonora, 1,500 tons register, was built in Belfast, Maine in 1869, and sold foreign in 1885. When this portrait by an unknown artist of the vessel at the Macabi Islands came up at auction, I had to have it to give to MMM. Displayable objects of the disgusting yet major guano trade are rare and a prize like this should be important in future exhibits. There is at least one other known portrait of a ship, a Thomaston vessel, with the same background.

Ivar Olsen, a native Scandanavian, and John Traynor, a 25-year-old seaman from Maine, crossed the Atlantic in a small dory on built at a Georgetown, Maine boatshop. They left Bath on July 5, 1881, in their boat which they named City of Bath, only 14 feet long, five feet wide, and 21 inches deep. After 55 days at sea with near fatal incidents, they arrived in Falmouth, England. They departed a couple of days later for Le Havre, France, and made arrangements for a series of one- and two-month-long exhibitions in Paris, Barcelona and other European cities. It was at Le Havre that Eugene Grandin painted this image of one of the intrepid sailors’ crossing events. Clifford N. Carver purchased the painting from a dealer in France 75 years later and donated to Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine. They traded it to Maine Maritime Museum for a Penobscot vessel painting which had been donated for the purpose of the trade, and a group of food containers.

Arthur Sewall & Company built eight steel four-mast barks rigged like the Dirigo, the first five for themselves, the remaining three for Standard Oil. Dirigo, meaning “I lead” in Latin, is the motto for the state of Maine and was selected as the name for the first of these, the first steel sailing vessel built in the United States. This painting of Dirigo, by William Edgar, was painted in Sydney in 1903. All of these vessels frequently carried kerosene in cased cans (case oil), often around Cape Horn and across the Pacific to Asia. This painting was loaned to the Museum in 1964 by Dorothy Sewall Jayne, daughter of William D. Sewall, partner in Arthur Sewall & Company. She was given it at one of the divisions of Sewall shipyard artifacts, probably at the time of the sale of York Hall, the William D. Sewall residence, about 1947. In 1991 the painting was donated by her children, Pamela Miller and Kennon Jayne.

In 1968, L.M.C. and Eleanor H. Smith purchased the Percy & Small shipyard in Bath, Maine, the only nearly intact yard in the United States to have built large wooden sailing vessels. They bought it to hold for the Museum, intending at first to sell it at cost, but eventually very generously donating it. A museum trustee commissioned this three-dimensional painting of the shipyard from local artist R. Valentine Gray (1923-2001). Gray was a commercial artist working in New York when he and his wife moved to Maine in 1971 to get out of the “rat-race.” Appreciating weathered wood, he had begun to use it in his three-dimensional paintings of old boats and buildings. And, indeed, the wooden portions of this painting of Percy & Small consist of weathered pieces of the shipyard buildings retrieved at that time. The artwork gives a perfect sense of the atmosphere of this group of buildings at the time the Museum first acquired them.

The following is a group of four paintings done on commission by Charles Robert Patterson for John H. Hyde’s Elmhurst mansion in Bath, Maine, in 1933. All four depict the maiden voyage to San Francisco of the big 1884 down-easter Henry B. Hyde. John Hyde’s family founded Bath Iron Works, the shipyard still operating in Bath today, although they did not build or own the Henry B. Hyde, nor were they related to Henry B. Hyde of New York, founder of the Equitable Life Insurance Company. We are not quite sure what attracted them to this vessel, although the Hyde was much admired in her day as a well-designed, well-built, and profitable Bath-built ship.  When the Hyde family sold Elmhurst in the mid-20th century, these four paintings were kept in the family, split up among family members. Each individual painting was donated separately between the 1990's and 2010's. We are happy that all four can be displayed together again.