DODD, Robert (1748 - 1816).
The Greenland Whale Fishery.
Oil on Canvas.
26" x 35 3/8" canvas.

Provenance: (Sale, Christie's, London, March 18, 1977, lot 73) Richard Green, London; London; Christie’s South Kensington: Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - $168,437

The Greenland Whale Fishery had its beginnings along the coast of Spitsbergen in 1611. After about 1650, whalemen moved west in search of new bowhead stocks and the term "Greenland Whale Fishery" came to refer to pelagic whaling in the waters between Spitsbergen and Greenland. Whaling ships followed the northward summer migration of the bowhead, sailing first to Spitsbergen, and then drifting west to the edge of the East Greenland ice pack. The season generally lasted four to five months.

In Dodd's painting, The Greenland Whale Fishery, the identity of the ships are not known. It can be said with some certainty that they were London-based vessels operating out of the Thames, from where the largest British whaling fleet emanated well into the 19th century. By the mid-18th century, the shortage of Arctic whales was sending fleets as far away as Greenland. In fact, the Howland Great Wet Dock at Rotherhithe - built at the end of the 17th century - was, in 1763, renamed the Greenland Dock.

In 1783, the year in which this work is dated, the British whaling industry saw a marked revival after a wartime depression. The primary cause for the slump was the government commandeering of a large number of whale ships for use as transporters. The trade soon began to revive after the peace settlement with both France and the newly independent United States. Likewise, an increase in the government whaling bounty to forty shillings per ton was an added incentive for more vessels to join this extremely lucrative trade. In fact, profits were such that it seems plausible that this painting was commissioned simply to mark a general return to prosperity for the whaling industry rather than any specific expedition.

This latter theory is supported by the fact that this painting was twice engraved and published, on the first occasion by John & Josiah Boydell of Cheapside in 1789 and again in 1795, by Fran. Ambrosi and Antoine Suntach. Two separate editions of these engravings would suggest a strong popular demand amongst whaling ship owners, masters and crews, for whom a generic image may have been more attractive than one of vessels belonging to their rivals. The engravings are reproduced in Kendall Whaling Museum Prints by M.V. and Dorothy Brewington, published in Sharon, Massachusetts, 1969, no. 151 and no. 189.

Dodd undertook meticulous research for his paintings and was very accurate in his depiction of the details of ships and conditions at sea. From about 1783 he engraved over a hundred of his paintings in aquatint and as a result his work gained a wide audience. In particular, he was one of the principal recorders of naval actions in the American War of Independence and published many of his renderings of these battles. Dodd exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1780, and from 1782 to 1809 he exhibited at the Royal Academy. His masterpiece is the large (76 by 134 inches) painting of Lord Howe's famous victory over the French, The End of the Battle of the First of June.