The "Dunedin" off the English Coast

Details

Accession Number02/01CreatorTudgay, Frederick, 1841-1921Date1875

Description

Media & Sizeoil on canvas: 487 x 790 mmInscriptionsl.r: F Tudgay 1875; reverse upper stretcher in pencil: Barnett #4564lower frame plaque: Dunedin/John Whitson/Master
Description"Frederick Tudgay was an English artist trained as a gilder and painter of interiors of vessels for Green, shipbuilder of Blackwall. He worked on commission for owners, producing commemorative paintings of new ships under sail and steam.

The Dunedin, which made a maiden voyage in 1874, was one of six ships with New Zealand names built for P. Henderson and Co. of Glasgow placed under the Albion Shipping Company in 1877. This painting of the Dunedin off the coast of England in 1875 was given by Robert Duncan (the Port Glasgow shipbuilder) to Captain John Whitson, the master of the Dunedin for 13 of its voyages to New Zealand, and was inherited by his daughter Alyth after he died at the age of 45 in Oamaru in 1886. Alyth Whitson gave the painting and the ship’s logbook for the 1882 voyage to the Shaw Cavill Company in Wellington in 1961.

This painting shows the Dunedin in the Albion Line colours of black hull, gold band and pink boot topping and flying the Albion Line flag, as she would have appeared when sailing with the first shipment of frozen meat in the first quarter of 1882. After November of that year, when the Albion Line had joined with Robert Shaw and Walter Savill’s shipping partnership to become the Shaw Savill & Albion Co. Ltd., all the ships had their hulls painted grey.

Maritime historian Ian Farquhar writes of the Dunedin’s doughty fifteen year service and mysterious disappearance eight years after the epic frozen meat voyage: Sailing from Port Chalmers on 15 February 1882, the Dunedin arrived in London on 26 May after a 98-day passage. She carried 4,909 sheep carcases. Between 1874 and 1889 she made a total of 17 round voyages between Britain and New Zealand, eleven of them to Port Chalmers. The Dunedin left Oamaru on 19 March 1890 and was spoken to prior to rounding Cape Horn, but was never seen again and was presumed wrecked."
ProvenancePurchased with majority funding from the Community Trust of Otago & supplementary funding from the Otago Maritime Society & Hocken Library Endowment Funds, 2001
CitationFrederick Tudgay (1841-1921), The "Dunedin" off the English Coast, 1875, oil on canvas: 487 x 790mm. Purchased with majority funding from the Community Trust of Otago & supplementary funding from the Otago Maritime Society & Hocken Library Endowment Funds, 2001, Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago, 02/01

Depicts or Relates to

NamesDunedin (Ship)SubjectsShips

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The "Dunedin" off the English Coast