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DESCRIPTION:
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Thomas Buttersworth Senior was baptized on the Isle of Wight on 6th May 1768. He served in the Royal Navy, enlisting aboard H.M.S. Enterprise on 17thAugust 1795. Two days later he joined the new frigate H.M.S. Caroline at Deptford on the Thames, as an able seaman. In November 1795 he was appointed a master-at-arms, and in 1800 attained the rank of midshipman. That same year he was invalided out of the service at Minorca and sent home to England. His experiences in the Navy gave Buttersworth an invaluable source of material from which to paint, and from the 27 large watercolours held at Greenwich of the 1797 Battle of St. Vincent and other Mediterranean subjects, it is believed they were painted on location. His son Thomas Junior was born in 1807. He too went on to become an accomplished marine artist painting in a very similar style. After about 1825, to avoid confusion, they regularly signed themselves “snr.” or “jnr.” respectively. Thomas Junior’s brother James Edward Buttersworth (1817-1894) became a celebrated marine artist in the United States after emigrating to New York in about 1847.
Thomas Senior lived in London for the rest of his life on retirement from the Navy. In 1813 he lived at Golden Lane in Kennington. By 1825 he was living at Trafalgar Street in Walworth, and in 1827 in Leadenhall Street, very near to the offices of the East India Company. In 1813 he exhibited his only painting at the Royal Academy, entitled “The Ville de Paris off the Tagus”. Belem Tower at the mouth of the River Tagus at Lisbon was a favourite subject of his, supporting the view that he must have visited the Portuguese capital.
In 1825 his “Battle of Trafalgar” was exhibited at the British Institution, and two years later “A View of Leith Pier, With the Royal Yacht George in the Roads” was shown at the Royal Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street. He died in London in 1841. Thomas Buttersworth Senior’s work is held in the collections of the Plymouth City Art Gallery, the Royal Naval Museum at Portsmouth, the Mariners Museum at Newport News in Virginia, the Penobscot Marine Museum at Searsport in Maine, the Peabody Essex Museum at Salem in Massachusetts, as well as museums in Venice and Sydney.
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