CPMH Mike Stammers Memorial Lecture 2024
Posted: Wednesday 17th April 2024
Date: 1 May 2024
Time: 5:30pm
Location: The Maritime Museum, Liverpool
Speaker: Tony Tibbles
‘Liverpool’s ship portrait artists’
Since the late eighteenth century Liverpool has been home, permanently or temporarily, to more than seventy artists whose principal activity was painting portraits of many of the ships that visited or were based in the port. They produced thousands of paintings which are now often the only surviving visual record of those ships.
In this lecture, Tony Tibbles will look at who these artists were and the paintings they produced. Some, like Samuel Walters and Joseph Heard, were very successful and were able to sustain themselves from their painting, but the majority of them relied on other work, whether it was associated, such as producing promotional material for the many local shipping companies, or unrelated, including plumbing and house decoration. Whilst some have well-known careers, others are more shadowy and some remain unidentified except for the work they produced.
Tony Tibbles is former Director of Merseyside Maritime Museum and author of The Dictionary of Liverpool Marine and Ship Portraitists, published by Liverpool University Press in 2023. This annual event is organised by the Centre for Port & Maritime History.
Image courtesy of National Museums Liverpool
