Michael Andrews 'Melanie and Me Swimming'
This morning we made our way to Tate Britain to specifically see the J. M. W. Turner Collection. I knew I would be blown away by seeing the work up-close and in person but being able to really look at his brush work did so much more than I thought. I was so excited to see Snowstorm and Shipwreck placed next to each other in the gallery as I had just finished a paper about them while discussing Turner and the sublime seascape. What really struck me about looking at these works, was being able to get close and crop out small semi-abstract scenes in the waves.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Although I do find extreme delight with the museum's overview of British maritime history and their collection of artifacts, I found it alarming that the mention of women was close to none. In the Lord Nelson exhibit about the Battle of Trafalgar there is reference to the letters Nelson wrote to his mistress when out at sea, but I did not find this to be enough, not today. Yes, seafaring has been a primarily male-dominated industry, I am not denying that history, but there are plenty of women to at least mention or give light to. There are the famous female pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny, Lady Sopworth raced against Mrs. Vanderbilt in the 1934 America's Cup making them the first women to compete in the race, and Englishwoman Lisa Clayton became the first woman to sail solo around the world in 1994. With it being the 100th anniversary of women getting the right to vote in the UK and with so many pioneering British female sailors in the sport today I would have thought more representation of maritime women would have been visible in the museum and readily available in their research libraries. That being said, the Caird Library and Archive is an immense resource for texts on the subject of women and seafaring, albeit that most all the work is offsite. Their two onsite research libraries are filled with texts on maritime tradition and I was again disappointed to not see any reference to women and seafaring while browsing the two rooms. In the piracy section there wasn't even a text on the two famous female pirates. I understand that not all the research tools that they have can be readily available for immediate public view, but it was an interesting observation. I became a member of the the Caird Library and Archive at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich because I was happy to see on their online archive they had a wealth of journals, publications, texts, and artifacts on women and the sea for research purposes. Unfortunatley because they were all offsite in store, none of them were readily available in the research library and not available online. Hoping to make it back to London for a 'research holiday' as the research librarian called it.