The art of painting craft

Published by the Antique Collectors’ Club. ISBN 1851493395. £25 hb.

This book joins the small fleet of marine books published by the ACC, including Early Sea Painters from 1660 to 1730 by the same author, a retired surgeon with a lifelong interest in marine history and picture collecting.

With two chapters on Monamy’s Circle (the small group of marine artists who worked during the last years of Peter Monamy’s life and for several years after his death and who include the most important of the group, Francis Swaine), this book is a rather good read on the ‘founding father’ of British marine painting.

The Monamy family history is full of skulduggery and a certain amount of illegal adventuring, ie smuggling and counterfeiting by Monmay’s colourful father Pierre.

The three main chapters cover Monamy’s background to his life as a marine artist, with two chapters discussing the paintings, the drawings and prints, with some good colour reproductions from the National Maritime Museum and the Bridgeman Art Library, among others, and some not so good black and white pictures. There is a stirring ‘raging seas’ picture of the royal yacht Royal Caroline in a force eight gale in January 1726, during a storm which continued for three days before George I and the royal party made a landing at Rye.

One for collectors of marine art and students of marine history.