Existing comment:
Ship Models from the Age of Sail:
From about 1600 until the end of the Age of Sail in the 1830s, English shipwright-modelers built large numbers of scale-model ships known today as dockyard models. Not only are they beautiful works of art, but because they were built at the same time and place as the ships they depict, dockyard models also serve as invaluable sources of information about how sailing men-of-war were designed, fitted out, and decorated. Only a handful of the actual ships remain, but more than four hundred contemporary English models have survived, fifty of them here at Annapolis. Taken together, they reliably illustrate virtually every facet of the shipwright's trade in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries.
All but one of the dockyard models and most of the French prisoner-of-war models on exhibit came to the Naval Academy in 1938 as a bequest of Colonel Henry H Rogers of Southampton, New York. They are organized to held illuminate numerous facets of daily life in England's Royal Navy, both at sea and in the Royal Dockyards where the King's ships were built and maintained. |