Historic Oswego Panoramic Poster Reprint

ORIGINAL TITLE:

The Encampment of the English Forces Near Portsmouth, Together With a View of the English and French Fleets at the Commencement of the Action Between Them on the XIXth of July MDXLV (19th of July 1545)

OTHER NAMES:

• The Cowdry Picture
• The Cowdry Print
• The Last Moments of the Mary Rose

This historic picture was in the first place painted in 1545 or just afterwards from eye-witness accounts – and was destroyed by fire in 1793. It shows the last man standing on the crow’s nest of the outstanding Tudor warship Mary Rose – the rest of the ship has disappeared as she sinks under the waves of the Solent.

This article describes the importance of the picture and the story of it is preservation and re-publication by modern fine art printing technology. In a sense, the story of the picture modestly echoes the story of the innovative technology that helped find, recapture and at last preserve the Mary Rose warship herself.

The picture measures closely two metres all over and a near-full-size reproduction hangs conspicuously in the Mary Rose Museum at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard to illustrate the context of the Battle of the Solent, the forgotten action in which Mary Rose went down. Sales of the same reproduction print help to raise funds for a new Mary Rose Museum building in which to reunite the inspiring remains of the resurrected warship with the thousands of her crew’s Tudor items recovered from the wreck site, from coins and cannon to English longbows.

The warship’s English flag is shown still flying as she slides to her death, surrounded by bodies in the centre of the picture, just above Southsea Castle.

The dispositions of the fleets for the sea battle, and of the English army preparing to defend Southsea and the approaches to Portsmouth, are on show here. The boats are in the right way shown in the deep-water channels of the Solent. Historians say that every one necessary who attended the event is in the picture, and it has been proven to be geographically accurate. No wonder that asking a question regarding the picture is all you need to get senior museum personnel talking at length on the fateful events of that day.

On the morning of July 19, 1545, merely the greatest invasion fleet ever to reach British shores had sailed around the eastern side of the Isle of Wight, landed troops and burned villages near Bembridge, and massed in the Solent with the aim of capturing the town and naval base of Portsmouth. It is thought up to 40,000 French invasion troops were on board.

The mighty French fleet, augmented by gun galleys on loan from the Vatican, had been sent to instruct King Henry VIII’s newly Protestant England a lesson and quash Henry’s assert to the throne of France once and for all. Henry had antecedently been protected from the French by his confederacy with Spain, friends he lost when he divorced his primary wife, the Spanish Catherine of Aragon.

A year earlier, in 1544, Henry had invaded France and laid siege to Boulogne – another battle recorded in a corresponding outstanding panoramic picture (by a dissimilar primary artist) now also available as a innovative reproduction helping the Mary Rose new museum building fund. Also in 1544, Henry commissioned the building of Southsea Castle to protect the sea lanes into Portsmouth Harbour – shown in this picture newly opened, just in time to fire on the French invaders.

The invasion fleet was twice as huge as the much more widely known and esteemed Spanish Armada discomfited by Francis Drake in later Elizabethan times. As the English fleet sailed out to engage the French off Southsea Castle, led by flagships The Great Harry and The Mary Rose, the Battle of the Solent had begun.

Today, the Battle of the Solent is largely forgotten as an inconclusive military stand-off in largely becalmed waters. In exercise the English won by virtue of the French being unable to break through to Portsmouth.

But the events which would other than as supposed or expected stay as just a historical footnote are alive in the memory because of the famous sinking of the Mary Rose, her dramatic rediscovery (in incisively the position where she is shown sinking in the picture) and then her uttermost resurrection in 1982 in front of a international TV audience of tens of millions of people.

The basi picture (artist unknown) of c.1545 is a brilliant piece of art. The characters are all full of life and style, drawn with immense detail and character.

Satellite mapping today of the coast of the Isle of Wight matches the coast painted here, even altho the picture’s aerial view could never have been seen by the artisan as there is no hill from which that view may be seen and evidently there were no aircraft of any sort in 1545. Old maps and plans of the town of Portsmouth show the precision of the layout of key buildings in the picture.

The underwater photographer on the project to find and raise the Mary Rose which culminated in her salvage in 1982 was Dr. Dominic Fontana, now Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Portsmouth, who has much more regarding the picture and it is exact geography on his site.

The firstborn picture was commissioned by the Master of the King’s Horse, Sir Anthony Browne, seen on the white horse in the dead centre of the picture, directly behind the King (a spectacular piece of political self-aggrandisement available to Browne as the client paying the artist! – the Commander-in-Chief of the army, Sir Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, is painted riding alongside Browne, for the most part obscured but for his mighty beard). Browne had earlier commissioned the panoramic picture of “The Siege of Boulogne”, in a much simpler, cartoonistic style than that of the artisan responsible for this work. Perhaps he learned from the basi work that he necessitated an artisan with more sophisticated skills.

These two pictures plus two others depicting the 1544 crusade in France and one from 1547 hung in the dining hall of Browne’s home, Cowdry House (a.k.a. Cowdry Castle) in Sussex, which became the seat of the Viscounts Montague when Browne’s family was ennobled. The other pictures of the 1544 effort in France were “The Departure from Calais” and “The Camping of The King at Marquison”.

A fire destroyed Cowdry House in 1793 and all the historic introductory pictures went up in smoke. Today the old walls of the Cowdry House ruins still rise to a great height near the international polo fields of what is now called Cowdray Park at Midhurst in West Sussex. After 200 years mouldering away, the ruins were restored and opened again in early 2007.

So how may we have reproductions of the destroyed Battle of the Solent picture? Just five years before the fire, by a stroke of outstanding good luck and brilliant timing, the Society of Antiquaries of London had copied both pictures to preserve as indispensable historical records. In 1788 Browne permitted the society to commission Samuel Hieronymus Grimm to make painstaking copies by hand – in plainly masterly fashion. While doing so, Grimm painted his own watercolour and ink pictures of Cowdry House itself. The society then applied a fine engraver, James Basire, to make plates from Grimm’s copies; black-and-white prints were then published for the enlightenment of historians and military scholars.

The 1788 prints were very big for prints at that time – 1,775mm (nearly 6ft.) wide, by 545mm (nearly 22 inches) high. The engravings had to be printed in two halves on pairs of sheets of paper that were then joined, as 18th Century paper-making engineering science did not reach to sheets of even 3ft. wide.

Sometime over the centuries from 1788 another artisan hand-coloured one of the 1788 prints. This was used to make a replica Battle of the Solent 1788 print which in 2007 went on sale on the Internet to support the Mary Rose Museum. So the best available 21st Century high-resolution scanning and computerised fine-art printing technologies have now been applied to capture and in a faithful manner reproduce the fine details of a hand-coloured Basire engraving from Grimm’s 1788 hand copy after the 1545 initial painting.

The stylishly coloured replica looks best on canvas, which lends a suitably old feel to the picture, but is likewise available on archival paper. Both are printed with UV-resistant, archival pigment inks, in a seven-colour giclée printing process. Surprisingly, the richly elaborated old picture looks impressive on the sparse walls of minimalist modern homes.

DONATIONS TO The Mary Rose MUSEUM FUND

The Mary Rose was the pride of the Tudor Navy built by Henry VIII – “the father of the English navy”. After she sank in the Battle of the Solent, she lay on the sea bed off Southsea Castle for 437 years until she became an global icon again when she dramatically rose to the surface again in 1982.

Since then she has been intensively treated and has now been restored from the detrimental effects of soaking in sea water for four centuries.

Now a new museum building is necessitated to reunite the outstanding ship – presently inspiringly displayed in an ancient arid dock underneath a big hut in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, southern England – with the artefacts found alongside her in the mud of the Solent sea bed.

But Britain’s Heritage Lottery Fund – the applicable funding authority – has so far refused to bestow the necessary £13.5m towards the new museum building, which remains in doubt, casting doubt on the future of the ancient warship herself.

To aid raise funds towards the £23m. total required, the publishers of the print request fascinated persons to make voluntary donations. They themselves promise 20% of the online price of the Battle of the Solent art print (and an related spoof Tudor Football reproduction poster) will go to the fund.

Incidentally, there is a free download available of wallpaper for your PC carrying the spoof Tudor Football reproduction poster). When downloading your free computer wallpaper you also have the probability to make a voluntary donation to the museum fund online … you will be helping preserve distinctive British inheritance for your children.

Historic Oswego Panoramic Poster Reprint

This is a museum quality, town view print on premium, archival paper. This medium, along with UV resistant, archival inks, helps to ascertain a superior contrast, solution and vivid-color rendering of the basi work.

Original town views have been sold at auction for as high as various thousand dollars. This habit made, authentic replica would make an graceful gift or tasteful addition to the home or office.

HISTORY OF THE PANORAMIC MAP

A popular cartographic form applied to depict U.S. and Canadian cities and towns for the duration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the panoramic map. Also known as town views, panoramic maps are not in general drawn to scale. They show street patterns, buildings, and major landscape features in perspective. Preparation of panoramic maps involved a tremendous amount of painstakingly elaborated labor. For each project a frame was developed, showing in perspective the pattern of streets. The artisan then walked the streets, sketching buildings, trees, and other features to present a finish landscape as seen from an elevation of 2,000-3,000 feet. These selective information were then entered on the frame in his workroom. The most successful print publisher in the nineteenth century was Currier and lves. Best remembered for their views of each day life in Victorian America, they also prepared bird’s-eye views of New York City, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington. Famous panoramic artists included Albert Ruger, Thaddeus Fowler, and the brothers, O.H and H.H Bailey. Surviving panoramic maps are very ordinary today and command premium prices from map and print dealers. Panoramic maps give a pictorial record of Anglo-America’s cities for the duration of the post-Civil War amount of time and for a heap of localities, provide the sole nineteenth-century perspective of the community. (Source: Library of Congress).

Historic Oswego Panoramic Poster Reprint Photo

Historic Oswego Panoramic Poster Reprint Photo

Historic Oswego Panoramic Poster Reprint Pic

Historic Oswego Panoramic Poster Reprint Image