Lot 63: John Miller Marshall (fl.1881-1927) Caught in a Cyclone: the Buckingham, with decks awash and sails reefed, battling through a tremendous sea

Caught in a Cyclone: the Buckingham, with decks awash and sails reefed, battling through a tremendous sea
signed 'J. Millar Marshall' (sic) and dated 1894 (lower left)
oil on canvas
76.2 x 50.8cm (30 x 20in).

EXHIBITED:
Royal Academy, 1894, no. 826 as 'Caught in a Cyclone'.

The Buckingham was a large steel four-masted barque built by Roydens at Liverpool and launched in 1888. Ordered for McVicar & Marshall's Palace Line, she sported a particularly beautiful figurehead of Queen Victoria holding a rose, and measured fully 308 feet in length with a 45 foot beam. Registered at 2,668 tons gross (2,613 net), she had enormous cargo capacity and, in her early career, was largely employed in the jute trade. Sold to German owners in 1901 and renamed Bertha, she was subsequently resold to different German owners who, rather curiously, renamed her Ottawa. Taken over by the American Shipping Board during the Great War, she was reconditioned and afterwards re-christened Muscoota by none other than the wife of President Woodrow Wilson. Sold to a consortium when her wartime role finished, she was so damaged in a collision east of Melbourne on Christmas Day, 1922, that she never put to sea again and ended her days as a hulk in Sydney harbour.

John Miller Marshall was born in England and arrived in Australia in the late 1880s. He was seemingly attracted to Victoria in search of gold but stayed there in order to paint. His picture 'Fossicking for Gold', dated 1893, hangs in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. It shows a scene at the Creswick goldfields near Ballarat in Victoria and is from a period when a second large discovery of gold attracted many fossickers into the area. Fossickers were miners who searched through mined earth for any remaining gold and, in this painting, Miller Marshall portrays two fossickers at rest. By the mid 1890s, he had returned to England.