Arrowsmith

James Bard painted ships, and only ships, with the accuracy of a draughtsman and the eye of someone who had watched them go by from the Hudson shore since childhood. He is thought to have produced around four thousand portraits of steamboats, sloops and barges, most in strict profile, most facing left. He worked with his twin brother John until the 1840s, then alone. Owners commissioned the pictures, which meant details mattered: the number of windows, the paddle boxes, the scrollwork on the pilot house. He measured vessels before painting them. The results are not conventionally sophisticated. Perspective is flattened, water is stylised, crowds on deck are repeated from picture to picture. What survives is a record of nineteenth century American river traffic more complete than any photographic archive, made by someone who cared about getting each hull right.