Art Gallery of Ontario
Ship Models in the Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario
128 pages, jacketed paperback, 280 x 240 mm, 100 illustrations
PRICE: £25.00
ISBN: 9781903470824
FORTHCOMING. AVAILABLE TO BUY IN NOVEMBER 2008.
By Simon Stephens
Spanning some 350 years, the Thomson Collection of historic ship models contains examples of exquisite workmanship and some of the masterpieces of the genre. Pride of the collection are the rare British dockyard models made to scale for affluent 18th-century clients closely associated with the Navy. A large number of models – made from wood and bone, with rigging of human hair – were made by some of the 120,000 French and other prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars. The diverse collection also includes tugs, dredgers, trawlers, cargo vessels, passenger steamers, private yachts, corvettes, battleships, cruisers, torpedo boat destroyers and two aircraft carriers.
The author considers the rich history and the artistry of model shipbuilding. New photography captures the incredible workmanship – the carving, casting, gilding and stitching – that such model-making demands.
Ken Thomson was no mere trophy gatherer. A man of passionate commitment and of wide-ranging cultural curiosity, the late Lord Thomson of Fleet (1923–2006) began a half-century of collecting in 1953 and continued to the very end of his life. The Thomson Collection has drawn the respect of museum curators worldwide. In terms of quantity and quality, the Collection’s body of Canadian art has no equal; and a number of works, principal among them The Massacre of the Innocents, the masterpiece of Rubens’s early maturity, are of truly international significance. More
The recent rediscovery of Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents offers an important opportunity to reassess the painter’s early career. Of Rubens’s works immediately following his return to Antwerp in 1608, it is the most assured, achieving a remarkable complexity both compositionally and emotionally. More
The Thomson collection contains examples of the highest quality of most types of medieval ivory carving, both secular and religious. These include large statuettes of the Virgin and Child intended to stand on altars in chapels, small versions for private use in the home and folding tablets or diptychs with scenes from the life of Christ carved in relief. More
Together with important First Nations material, the Thomson Canadian Collection is the largest of all private holdings of Canadian art. There are rare and incomparable examples of Northwest Coast Aboriginal art. Krieghoff’s inspired accounts of life in the Canadas, prior to Confederation, bring the light and atmosphere of history fully into the present. A staggering power to capture the fleeting and the fugitive in paint still distinguishes the work of the early 20th-century painter Morrice... More
