Hove to

Arthur Briscoe (1873-1943) was an etcher and painter of marine subjects. Educated at Shrewsbury School, he studied art at the Slade School under Fred Brown and at the Académie Julian in Paris and then spent his time sailing. Briscoe painted and wrote on yachting subjects including Handbook on Sailing under the pseudonym of Clove Hitch. Briscoe portrayed not just sailing vessels and the sea itself but, in particular, he delighted in portraying seafaring men at work.

Briscoe's original prints are now generally acknowledged as the finest marine etchings of the 20th century, as they display both the artist's intimate knowledge of the sea and his mastery of the etching needle. In particular, Briscoe conveyed the motion of the sea itself and the varied effects of light and shade with extraordinary economy of line. In 1926 Briscoe made a superb scale model of the Cutty Sark, a vessel which appears intermittently throughout his sketchbooks.

One of the most dramatic of Arthur Briscoe's etchings of the high seas, Hove To ranks amongst the great prints of the British Etching Revival. In Arthur Briscoe: Marine Artist  (1974), Alex Hurst opens his description of this etching thus: "Many people will rate this picture as amongst the artist's best. James McBey, I believe, admired it above all Briscoe's work". Here we see a tall, fully-rigged ship caught in the full force of a gale, the water streaming over her hull as she fights her way through the storm. The title needs explanation to non-specialists: in sailing, heaving to (to heave to and to be hove to) is a way of slowing a sailboat's forward progress, as well as fixing the helm and sail positions so that the boat does not actively have to be steered.

See:

http://www.campbell-fine-art.com/cat_works.php?art=128

See: http://www.campbell-fine-art.com/artists.php?id=128

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   March 2018