Art Collections Online

This ship is all but ready to begin active service.  There is great bustle around the ship as the workmen finish off and supplies are taken on board.  The human figures are dwarfed by the scale of the ship.  The Western Front publication described the scene, ‘It looks like chaos, but everything works up perfectly to the moment when she casts off, free of the seas.’

Muirhead Bone was the first appointed official war artist.  As one of Britain’s leading draughtsmen, he was renowned for the almost photographic detail he achieved in his drawings.  As well as recording the war on the Front, Bone spent time on the Clyde in Scotland, documenting shipbuilding. He sketched with a notebook strapped to his hand.  These prints show different stages in the building, as well as views of the yard, one from the top of crane. One journalist wrote that his series, ‘delights in the intricacies of scaffolding and mechanical contrivances’.  These images were also published in a War Office publication, The Western Front, vol II, 1917.

Bone was born in Glasgow and studied at Glasgow School of Art.  He settled in London in 1901. He was an official war artist in 1916-1918, and the official Admiralty artist in 1939-1946. Bone was knighted in 1937.