Salt Bark – Gloucester, 1947

Salt Bark - Gloucester by Gordon Grant depicts a large sailing vessel being guided into port by a steam tugboat, while in the foreground several men in small rowboats work and tend to their gear, a scene rendered with Grant's characteristic precision and feel for atmosphere. The composition is structured around a dominant vertical, the ship's masts rising against a soft, hazy expanse of sky and lower horizontal register of smaller vessels and waterfront structures. Gloucester's long-standing identity as America's oldest seaport offered Grant the kind of scene that recurs throughout his career. Works such as this reflect what is generally considered his defining artistic focus, namely ships, harbors, and coastal life, subjects for which he came to be regarded as one of the notable American marine artists of the early to mid twentieth century.

Another edition of this lithograph can be found in the collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO

Born in San Francisco, Gordon Grant is known for his etchings and paintings of marine subjects. He also painted portraits, streets, harbors, beaches and marines, and was an illustrator, whose work included pulp fiction for Popular Detective magazine in the 1930s. Skilled with watercolor, Grant was honored many times by the American Watercolor Society, and his memberships included the Society of Illustrators, Salmagundi Club, Allied Artists of America, New York Society of Painters, and American Federation of Artists.

At age 13, he sailed around Cape Horn on a four-month voyage to Scotland for schooling, an experience that remained a permanent influence on his career. He studied art in Heatherly and at the Lambeth School of Art in London, and in 1895 became a staff artist for the San Francisco Examiner. The next year, he took the same type of job for the New York World. For Harper's Weekly, he served as a combat artist covering both the Boer War and the Mexican Revolution. He also worked for Puck magazine for eight years and did illustration for children's and adult books.

His reputation as a marine painter became much stronger after 1906, when prints of his painting of the U.S. Constitution went on the market with popular reception, and the monies were used to preserve the old ship. Grant and others were successful lobbying Congress to designate the vessel a national monument, and Grant's painting of the U.S. Constitution is in the White House collection, where it has hung in the Oval Office.