The Old Frigate Iris with Her Freight of Cable Alongside the Great Eastern at Sheerness: The Cable Passed from the Hulk to the Great Eastern
Medium
Watercolor over graphite with touches of gouache (bodycolor)
Dimensions
Sheet: 6 7/16 × 9 11/16 in. (16.3 × 24.6 cm)
Classification
Drawings
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gift of Cyrus W. Field, 1892
Accession Number
92.10.55
Tags
Art Historical Context
In 1865, marine artist Robert Charles Dudley captured a pivotal moment in technological history with his precise *The Old Frigate Iris with Freight of Cable Alongside the Eastern at Sheerness*. watercolor over graphite, heightened with touches of gouache depicts the massive steamship *Great Eastern*—originally designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel—receiving coils of transatlantic telegraph cable from the decommissioned frigate *Iris at the Sheerness naval dockyard in Kent, England. Dudley's detailed rendering highlights the industrial scale of the operation, with ships dwarfed by the cable's imm...
About the Artist
Robert Charles Dudley · 1813–1913
British, 1826–1909