Mr Doxford

Hi Thanasis, Thank you for posting that ship portrait by one of the Roux family, of Marseilles. I have one of their ship portraits, of the "Brig Captain Hathorn of Wigtown, John McWilliam Master, leaving Marseilles Feb 7th 1863", which I found in an Edinburgh charity shop about fifty years ago. I had no idea what I'd bought (it cost me 10 shillings in old money), until John Craxton RA, who was based in Xania, in Crete, at the time, spotted it hanging on my wall, and gave me the run down on the Roux family, who would paint ship portraits, usually for the Captains of ships, who would order the portrait as they entered the Med, and collect them on the way out again. The whole family seemed to be involved in the family business, and as they were painting them for professional seamen, their attention to detail was very exact, so I would imagine looking at Roux ship portraits would be a good source of pretty accurate information for the ship modeller. There are quite a few of them on the internet, and they used to come up fairly regularly at Sotheby's Marine Paintings auctions. When I was at sea in the 1970's, I commissioned three watercolours of ships I had sailed on, by a Mister R.D. Morris of Auckland, one of the MV Canberra Star in rough weather, another of the MV English Star, and one of the Merchant Navy training ship the Glen Strathallan, which was based on the Thames, and was later sunk to be used to train RN divers. She was stripped of anything useful before being scuttled, and her triple expansion engine ended up in the Science Museum in South Kensington. RD Morris is a terrific marine artist, who used to come down to the ships berthed in Auckland, to ask if anyone wanted their ship painted, and I met him when I was an engineer cadet on a very ugly container ship on her maiden voyage called the ACT 5, which no one would have wanted a painting of, but he made a beautiful water colour of the Blue Star Line's Canberra Star, ( in bad weather, spray bursting over the fore deck ) which was the best ship I ever sailed on. He worked very fast, and the completed painting was delivered, in a frame, ready to be hung the next morning, which was pretty impressive, especially as he only charged me $10 NZ. There are quite a few of his paintings on the internet. If anyone from this site would like to check his work out, I'm sure they won't be disappointed. know this has little to do with ship build logs, except for the fact that modellers might find it useful to study Roux paintings because of their accuracy and attention to detail. Their depiction of rigging always looks pretty impressive to my (untrained) eye. I hope I haven't been too off topic for this wonderful site. Thanks to everyone who posts their build logs, with how they dealt with the problems they encountered on the way.