An opportunity to collect a historic traditional oil painting depicting a shipwreck by WM Clarkston Stanfield RA. Signed mid right. A powerful painting with a sailboat vessel being engulfed by the sea, only partially shown behind the treacherous rocks at shore. An atmospheric and telling composition. From a private collection. Dimensions: 25"h x 30.75"w (framed). In very good vintage condition. WM Clarkston Frederick Stanfield (1793-1867) first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1820 and continued, with only a few early interruptions, to his death. He was also a founder member of the Society of British Artists (from 1824) and its president for 1829, and exhibited there and at the British Institution, where in 1828 his picture Wreckers off Fort Rouge gained a premium of 50 guineas. He was elected Associate Member of the Royal Academy in 1832 and became a full Academician in February 1835. Stanfield was awarded a major retrospective of his work at the inaugural Royal Academy Winter Exhibition. In its appraisal of the show, The Times wrote: "There are no English painters whose works have won wider and warmer popularity outside the artistic pale. Stanfield's practiced command of the artist of composition, his unerring sense of the agreeable and picturesque in subject and effect, his pleasant and cheerful color and last, not least, the large use to which he turned his knowledge and love of the sea and shipping... (all) added to the widespread admiration he had won by his consummately skillful scene painting, (and) combined to make him one of the most popular, if not the most popular, of landscape painters."