Sir,
Having now absorbed the more recent contribution in your pages, which, with admirable clarity and intellectual ballast, demonstrated that motor-racing cannot rightly be admitted to the rank of fine art, I must beg your indulgence for a brief note of apology. My earlier letter, dashed off in a gale of outrage, was perhaps intemperate in tone and premature in judgement. I see now that the esteemed author of the second essay and I are, in fact, of one mind: the automobile may be a machine of interest, even of beauty in a mechanical sense, but it is not an art.
In my zeal to defend the supremacy of the ship, I mistook your journal’s temporary flirtation with motoring aesthetics for a settled doctrine. Happily, your second contributor has restored reason to the discourse, and I can only echo his conclusions with wholehearted approbation.
At the same time, I reiterate , more calmly this time , that ships most assuredly belong to the canon of fine art, and I venture to suggest that if your journal should ever wish to publish a full-length article advancing that claim, I would be uniquely qualified to supply it. Permit me to note, without false modesty, some relevant experience:
• Forty years’ service in the Royal Navy, including command of both destroyers and cruisers, affording me intimate acquaintance with the structural, aesthetic, and symbolic dimensions of naval architecture.
• Participation in the preservation of HMS Victory, during which I worked alongside shipwrights, conservators, and historians in the careful restoration of her timbers and rigging.
• Lectures delivered at the National Maritime Museum on the evolution of the man-of-war as both instrument of statecraft and exemplar of design.
• Personal study of ship plans, models, and log-books, some dating from the eighteenth century, which I have examined with the same reverence others reserve for illuminated manuscripts.
• A lifelong habit of contemplating, both at sea and ashore, the poetic interplay of form, function, and environment that renders a great ship something far beyond the merely mechanical.
In short, I should be delighted, if invited, to compose a considered essay on the ship as a fine art , an argument founded not in passing enthusiasm but in a lifetime of maritime service and reflection.
I trust you will accept my earlier eruption of indignation as the product of overzealous loyalty to the sea, and my present note as a pledge of cooperation in the noble cause of elevating ships to a place where they receive their rightful aesthetic recognition.
I remain, Sir,
Your obedient servant,
Captain (Ret’d) A. J. Thurlow, RN
