A pair of works capturing the very essence of the challenge faced by the clippers of the 19th century. The illumination and detail throughout are vintage Buttersworth, with the trademark deep clouds giving way to a graduated break showing the heavenly distance beyond the horizon.
The lead ship with a majority of her sail set, the F.A. Delano-owned medium clipper MEMNON rises over and through an ocean swell, her lower hull color complementing the American flags of both ships and the swallow-tail houseflag on the following ship. This clipper appears to be the same featured subject in the companion painting in which two clippers ride treacherous seas in a gale with their sails attached firmly to the spars by the reef points. Their abbreviated storm sails are employed to keep their bows perpendicular to the large swells, whereas memnon runs with all canvas drawing on a favorable sea.
Buttersworth depicts the active, uniformed crews in states of highly organized activity, driven undoubtably by the officers' directions. The emerald atlantic ocean green relates the motion and creates a compliment to the soft luminescence of the cloud edges in the atmospheric highlights.
