Joseph Lee
Portrait of the Ship Excelsior
c. 1876

About the Item

Oil and India ink on canvas, 34 1/4 x 54 1/4 in. Signed (at lower right): Joseph Lee Painted about 1876 EX COLL.: Captain Oscar Conrad Kustel (1834–1921), San Francisco, California, and later Ontario, California; to his sister-in-law, Adella Hinkley [Haedrich] (1858–1940), Sacramento, California; by descent to her half-brother, Milton Mose Remington (1866–1946), Placer, California; by descent to his son, Harold Edward Remington (1902–1994), Sacramento, California; and by descent in the family, until the present Born in England, Joseph Lee rose to prominence in San Francisco, California, in the 1860s and 1870s as a marine and landscape painter. (The best source on Lee remains Alice Putnam Erskine’s short article, “Joseph Lee. Painter,” Antiques XCV [June 1969], pp. 806–11.) The first recorded appearance of Lee’s work was in 1858, when he was awarded a prize for a painted tin sign at the Second Industrial Exhibition of the Mechanics’ Institute of the City of San Francisco, indicating that his training came from sign painting. He must have turned to painting on canvas soon afterward, and by the later 1860s had made highly accurate ship portraits his specialty. By 1870, Lee had painted enough canvases to draw the attention of a local critic, who reviewed a group of his works: Mr. Joseph Lee, a painter who has for some time “dabbled in the dark,” has recently emerged from his somnolescent state, and shows several pictures, which indicate merit. . . . The vessel is very neatly painted the sky is not bad, and some parts of the water are quite nicely handled. There is, however, a “veneerism” or rather a hardness about this artist’s productions which is disastrous to a rigid picture of nature. . . . Mr. Lee has the feeling, all wants is a freer and more natural touch to make his works worthy of admiration. (Caliban, in Alta California, June 5, 1870, as quoted in Erskine, p. 806). Lee was first listed as an artist in the San Francisco city directory in 1872. He worked variously around the Bay Area, painting sites in San Francisco, Oakland, and Alameda. His work is characterized by an almost obsessively fastidious attention to the smallest of realistic details, which suited him best for his ship portraits. Indeed, it is said that seamen along San Francisco’s waterfront used to say “you could rig a ship from one of Lee’s pictures” (Erskine, p. 809). For as Erskine notes of Lee’s ship portraits: In Joseph Lee’s surviving ship portraits all the vessels are seen to port. The background usually shows, in smaller scale, a three-quarter view of bow or stern of the same ship or a ship of the same class. His ships are all apparently in full sail, or, to judge them the way the smoke blows, at full speed. Lee’s pictures are done with such accuracy, with every shroud, ratline, and block and pulley exactly in place, that he might have made his drawings from rigging plans. Lee painted this masterful portrait of the schooner Excelsior sailing off Point Bonita, located at the entrance to San Francisco Bay in the Marin Headlands, about 1876. The Excelsior was built that year by Hans D. Bendixsen in his shipyard in Fairhaven, California, on the northern peninsula of Humboldt Bay, across the narrows from Eureka. Bendixsen was an important figure in west coast maritime history, building over fifty three- and four-masted schooners in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Bendixsen built the Excelsior, a splendid three-masted schooner of 348 tons measuring 138 feet long by 32 feet wide by 11 feet deep, for the Austro-Hungarian Kustel brothers, who had emigrated to California via Panama in 1852. The Excelsior was first commanded by Captain Oscar Conrad Kustel (1834–1921) and based in the port of San Francisco. She was subsequently sold to John Smith of San Francisco, in 1884, and later to Charles Nelson, in 1886. In 1878, the swift Excelsior made a ballast passage from Shanghai to Port Townsend, Washington, in twenty-seven days. She operated in the Pacific for thirty years, carrying lumber, salmon, and other valuable cargo, and was wrecked in Nelson’s Lagoon, Alaska, on August 30, 1906. Lee’s portrait of the Excelsior has descended in the family of Oscar Conrad Kustel until the present time. Lee painted another portrait of the Excelsior (sold by Hirschl & Adler in 1978 to a corporate collection). This second painting is essentially identical to the present one in both size and composition, with only a slightly different flag configuration meaningfully differentiating the two works.

Creator:
Joseph Lee (1827 - 1880, American)
Creation Year:
c. 1876
Dimensions:
Height: 43.5 in (110.49 cm)Width: 62 in (157.48 cm)
Medium:
India Ink,Oil
Movement & Style:
American Realist
Period:
Late 19th Century
Condition:
Gallery Location:
New York, NY
Reference Number:
Seller: APG 20337D/21stDibs: LU2310062652
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