Leo Webster
Senior Specialist
Lot 109AR
Derek George Montague Gardner(British, 1914-2007)The China clipper Taitsing racing up Channel, 1866
18 October 2017, 14:00 BST
London, KnightsbridgeSold for £17,500 inc. premium
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Rhyanon Demery
Head of Sale
Jon Baddeley
Specialist Consultant Collectors, Science & Marine
Derek George Montague Gardner (British, 1914-2007)
The China clipper Taitsing racing up Channel, 1866
signed and dated 'Derek G. M./GARDNER/1989' (lower right) and inscribed 'The China Tea ship "TAITSING" (1865-1883) resetting her flying jib as she comes up Channel during the Great Tea Race 1866.' (verso)
oil on canvas
71.1 x 100.3cm (28 x 39 1/2in).
Together with a signed note from the artist.
signed and dated 'Derek G. M./GARDNER/1989' (lower right) and inscribed 'The China Tea ship "TAITSING" (1865-1883) resetting her flying jib as she comes up Channel during the Great Tea Race 1866.' (verso)
oil on canvas
71.1 x 100.3cm (28 x 39 1/2in).
Together with a signed note from the artist.
Footnotes
Provenance
With The Polak Gallery, London, no. 989/1.
Henry Abram & Sons Ltd, Glasgow (acquired from the above in July 1992).
Private collection, UK.
Gardner's note reads as follows:
'In May 1866 sixteen of the finest clipper ships were assembled in the Pagoda anchorage below Foochow waiting to load the new season's teas prior to the annual race home to London. Among these was the TAITSING, a new ship only recently arrived from London and launched only ten months earlier for Findlay & Longmuir of Greenock by Charles Connell at Glasgow. Since the late 1840s the race home to London from China with tea had become increasingly an occasion of enormous rivalry between the ships taking part, the first ship to dock receiving a handsome financial award or premium which, needless to say, was much coveted. Public interest had grown to an extent where people living far from the sea eagerly read the shipping columns of their daily papers for news of the racing clippers and among the shipping community wagers were placed to forecast the winning ship. Of all those races over the years the Great Tea Race of 1866 has become legendary when three clippers which left the Min river on the same tide docked in London ninety-nine days later on the same tide. These were the ARIEL, TAEPING and SERICA while the TAITSING, under Captain Daniel Nutsford, which had left Foochow a day later docked in London only 101 days out on 9th. September 1866.
My painting shows the TAITSING racing up Channel with weather stun'sails set on her fore and main on the morning of 8th. September 1866.
The TAITSING, like many of the China clippers of that period, was composite built, that is having teak planking over an iron framework. In her sail plan she set a single mizzen topsail and nothing above her royals.
On her maiden passage in 1865 the ship went out from London to Hong Kong arriving on 1st. February 1866 ninety-six days from the Downs. Her end came in 1883 when she was wrecked in the Indian Ocean on the Zanzibar coast.'