HMAS Sydney Engaging the German Cruiser SMS Emden, Off Cocos Island, Indian Ocean

by Arthur Victor Gregory

Dimensions:

30 cm x 52 cm

Medium:

Gouache and watercolour on paper

Setting:

WW I (1914-1918)

Courtesy of Mutual Art Auctions

Emden opened the engagement with rapid and accurate long-range fire, attempting to inflict as much damage as possible at the outset. Using Sydney’s superior speed and armament, hits were soon scored on Emden and eventually caused her surrender.

About Arthur Victor Gregory
Arthur was perhaps the most prolific portraitist of Australian shipping, producing great numbers of paintings for more than 50 years. His father, George Frederick Gregory, established a marine painting business in Melbourne in the 1850s, in which Gregory's elder half-brother George Frederick Junior also worked. They made numerous photographic reproductions of their ship portraits, selling the originals to captains or owners, and the photographs to the crews.

Arthur inherited the business on the death of his father in 1890 and continued to paint until World War II, when he stopped for wartime security reasons. He kept all his working sketches so he could repeat earlier paintings and make more copies of the same ship. His carefully detailed portraits of every kind of vessel seen on Port Phillip Bay created a body of work regarded as a valuable record of the maritime traffic of that port, and indeed of Australian shipping for the period.

Arthur worked mainly in watercolour, rarely in oils. He was a master of his genre, and hence necessarily limited in stylistic development. He painted the contemporary and everyday, rather than the retrospective and nostalgic. The market for his work was largely the people who knew the ships and required accurate detail.

More paintings by Arthur Victor Gregory
About HMAS Sydney (l)
HMAS Sydney was a Town Class, Light Cruiser; one of three ordered in 1910 which were part of the initial Australian fleet unit. On 4 October 1913 Sydney formed part of the Australian Fleet Unit that ceremonially entered her namesake harbour to a welcome from tens of thousands of spectators who turned out to welcome the arrival of ‘their’ fleet.