Art

Highly unusual for Maine is this scrimshawed sperm whale tooth by a sailor named Pettegrow from Rockland Maine. The other side has a image of the whaler Emerald. There were vessels of this name out of New Bedford and Sag Harbor.

Empire ogee mirror with reverse painting on glass at top. Painting shows a half-brig or brigantine with an American flag. The heavily raked masts and gunports are in the style of the privateers out of the Chesapeake in the War of 1812, which were commonly called Baltimore Clippers.

Sea chest with image of vessel Challenger painted inside. She was the Down Easter Challenger launched by the Sewall yard in Bath in 1877.

Needlepoint picture of the Manuel Llaguno, one of Wiliam Whorf's maritime history series. Whorf's spelling (Llaguna) varies slightly from the correct Llaguno.

The Nabraska (sic) Nebraska was one of hundreds of packets (ships operating on schedule) sailing the Atlantic before the Civil War. She was built in Newburyport, Massachusetts in 1845, for New York owners, and sailed to Liverpool that year and to Marseilles in 1847. She made at least one trip to China (1850), and like many packets, she switched to the southern cotton trade and was lost off Texas in 1857.

The British prided themselves on winning single-ship fights against the French. In June 1798, the 38-gun British frigate HMS Seahorse, under the command of Captain Edward J. Foote, captured the French frigate Le Sensible off the coast of Sicily. The battle, much of which took place at close quarters, lasted less than 15 minutes.

George Wasson, from a Brooksville family of shipbuilders and seafarers, painted and wrote about coastal Maine and the Penobscot Bay in the last decades of the 19th century and the early 20th. The Museum owns his last boat,Wave Crest,  built in Brewer in 1916. This painting's donor's father, Percival Cushman, worked on Wave Crest with Wasson and cruised with him. When Wasson died Cushman inherited the boat and sailed out of Sorrento until boat was given to Frank Hatch who gave it to the Museum.  

The John Carver was a bark built at the Carver yard in 1841, well before Waldo Pierce was born. Until 1870 she was Searsport owned then sold to New Bedford as a whaler. This painting does give the artist's impression of what the Searsport shore looked like, and shows the cords of wood in the foreground needed to heat houses in winter.

Oil painting

Like many ship portrait painters, Belfast's Percy Sanborn took commissions for signs and other decorative work. This sign was painted for the Belfast National Bank, established in 1879. It is signed by Sanborn, as are his paintings. Oil on board.