Charles Napier Hemy 1841-1917

Anonymous sale at auction in London, 11 December 1942;
Bought by the present owner in Canada, 25 June 1956

The rediscovery of Lands End Crabbers, the whereabouts of which had not been known for nearly half a century, brings to light a major work by arguably the most accomplished marine artist of his generation. Hemy was an artist greatly inspired by the strenuous and often dangerous life of the fishermen who made their living on the coasts of Britain. His images of mariners struggling with nets and sail-ropes, battling against the forces of the ocean made him the foremost painter of these subjects and made him a popular exhibitor at the Royal Academy. The artist John Brett wrote of Hemy's work “I will venture to suggest that if you want an expression of sea-wildness in connection with fishing, you had better go to Napier Hemy, whose pictures of such scenes have never been equalled.”

Hemy was born in Newcastle Upon Tyne in 1841, the son of a music teacher and composer who took his family to Australia in 1852 to work in the gold fields of Ballarat. When the family returned to Newcastle, Hemy’s love of art led him to enrol at the Newcastle Government School of Design where he was tutored by William Bell Scott. However, he had developed a deep-felt love of the sea from his ocean journey and he was drawn back to it in 1856 to work on a collier brig. His strong religious faith at first distracted Hemy from his other interests and he became a priest for two years in a Dominican House in Newcastle and in a monastery in Lyons. Hemy decided on his twenty-first birthday, after a period of ill health, to leave the priesthood and become a professional painter. He studied the works of the Pre-Raphaelites at the International exhibition of 1862 and his early artistic efforts were greatly influenced by the landscape painting of George Pinwell, William Dyce and Fred Walker. From 1865 through 1869 Hemy studied at the Antwerp Academy under Baron Leys and by the 1870s he had become an adept painter of scenes on the Thames in London where he lived and socialised with the likes of Whistler and Tissot. In the early 1880s his interest in marine subjects was able to fully manifest itself when he moved from London to Cornwall. 

Lands End Crabbers was painted during a period of personal and domestic harmony, for after his move from London to Falmouth he married his second wife, the daughter of a local merchant, Amy Mary Freeman with whom he had ten children. In Cornwall, Hemy was able to concentrate his attention on painting the sea and those whose livelihood was dependent upon it, away from the distractions of fashionable London society. Hemy '... exploited his love of the sea and his increasing technical virtuosity in painting the living, moving water... It was the work of the crabbers and oyster dredgers, and the fishers of bass, pollack, pilchards and shrimps, with their variety of craft and tackle, that principally fascinated him.' (Charles Napier Hemy R.A. 1841-1917, exhibition catalogue for the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne and the City Art Gallery, Plymouth, 1984, p. 43).

Lands End Crabbers was painted in the same year as a picture regarded to be Hemy's masterpiece The Smelt Net (private collection) that was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1887 as well as Sennen Cove. The Smelt Net depicts a less dramatic moment than other pictures by Hemy, a calm moment of two fishermen bringing up their nets. Where Lands End Crabbers differs from The Smelt Net is in the vantage of the viewer, which is moved closer so that the spectator views the action of the fishermen as though in a boat alongside theirs. The dynamic foreshortening of the boat extending beyond the confines of the picture space is closer to another of his works How We Caught the Pilchards of 1885 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool).

One of Hemy’s closest friends in the 1880s was Henry Scott Tuke who often painted from a French brigantine in Falmouth harbour. Hemy converted the Vandervelde, an old Seine boat that had been used to catch pilchards, into a floating studio. Three tons of granite was installed as ballast to minimise the rocking motion of the sea and a covered studio with windows to the water was constructed on deck. Many of Hemy's deep-sea subjects and harbour paintings were painted aboard the Vandervelde. In 1888 the vessel ran aground in a shallow creek. It was then driven ashore and installed in Hemy's garden at Churchfield in Falmouth, replaced afterwards with the commissioned yacht the Vandermeer.

Charles Napier Hemy was "the most accomplished marine painter of his generation. His intimate knowledge of the sea was central to his art – the ocean’s swell, its power, strength and dangers are all captured with a brilliance rarely equalled and never surpassed." (Brian Stewart, Director, Falmouth Art Gallery. From the introduction by Margeret Powell, Master of the Sea - Charles Napier Hemy RA, RWS 2004)