James Bard

Steamboat 'Florence'

Lot Closed

January 21, 04:24 PM GMT

Estimate

40,000 - 60,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

Property of a Private Collector

James Bard

1815 - 1897

Steamboat 'Florence'

oil on canvas

1868

Height 28 1/4 in. by Width 48 1/2 in.

signed J. BARD. PAINTER. NY, lower right, inscribed FLORENCE on ship and flag

Renwick C. Hurry, 1936;
The New York Historical Society, 1936-1995;
Sotheby’s, New York, Important Americana: Property from The New York Historical Society, October 22, 1995, lot 51.

Annual Report and List of Members of The New York Historical Society for the Year 1936 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1937), p.14.
Elaine Andrews, American Landscape and Genre Paintings in the New-York Historical Society: A Catalog of the Collection, Including Historical, Narrative, and Marine Art (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1982), no. 77, p. 23.
Anthony J. Pulso, The Bard Brothers: Painting America Under Steam and Sail (H.N. Abrams, New York, in association with the Mariners’ Museum, 1997), p. 114 and 167.

Built in 1868 in Keyport, New Jersey, the Florence steamboat ran in New York waters for a few years until she was taken to Washington, D.C. Florence boasted a gross tonnage of 215.10, a net tonnage of 174.74, and horsepower of 150. Her measurements included a length of 127 feet, breadth of 21.6 feet, and depth of 7.9 feet.¹

Twin brothers, James (1815-1897) and John Bard (1815-1897), were the most noteworthy and prolific marine artists of the mid-nineteenth century. Throughout his oeuvre, James Bard illustrated nearly every steamboat and schooner built or owned around the port of New York. Albeit a self-taught artist, Bard possessed a mariner’s eye that contributed to the regard of his paintings as so exacting that one could almost rebuild the vessel based on his painting alone. The detailed draftsmanship of the ship architecture reinforces why Bard received commissions from the most important maritime merchants, steamboat operators, shipbuilders, and captains on the Hudson River and Long Island Sound as a means to record their ships for posterity. Bard’s paintings not only serve as historical documents of the ships at a time when few visual sources existed, but also express how the ships embodied symbols of speed, beauty, and national advancement that irrevocably altered the country’s economic and cultural geography.

A drawing of this subject by Bard is in the collection of the Mariners Museum, Newport News, Virginia.

¹ U.S. Treasury Department, Annual List of Merchant Vessels of the United States (Washington, DC. U.S Government Printing Office, 1889), 286.