A Thick Night Off the Goodwins, from "Illustrated London News"

Engraver Mason Jackson British
After Lionel Percy Smythe British

Not on view

This print shows a sailor in wet weather gear and bearded companion intensely studying a chart below decks, as a woman nurses a baby and a kettle tips dangerously on a stove--the Goodwins are dangerous shoals off the east coast of Kent. Smythe, a painter of landscape and rustic genre had begun exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1863 and Jackson's wood engraving reproduces a work he showed there in 1869. The subject had been suggested by an article in the periodical "Household Words." As he worked out the composition, Smythe consulted with his stepbrother, the marine painter William Lionel Wyllie, made studies in a schooner on the Thames, and had a sloping platform constructed in his family's house in London. Smythe's watercolor version of the subject is now at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

A Thick Night Off the Goodwins, from "Illustrated London News", Mason Jackson (British, Ovingham, Northumberland 1819–1903 London), Wood engraving

Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.

Open Access

As part of the Met's Open Access policy, you can freely copy, modify and distribute this image, even for commercial purposes.

API

Public domain data for this object can also be accessed using the Met's Open Access API.