For many years, the ship painter Solon Francis Montecello Badger (1873-1919) was known by the misnomer Samuel Finley Morse Badger. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He lived with his father, who was also a marine painter, and as a teenager, lodged with William Stubbs, also a renowned ship painter. For a while, Badger apprenticed as a trunk maker, but took up painting when the business owner moved to the West. Primarily a self-taught artist, he spent much time painting around Boston Harbor, and frequently sailed a small yacht to measure vessels for his paintings.

The best of Badger’s ship paintings can sell for $70,000 or more, such as a painting he did of the Thomas W. Lawson. At the time, the Lawson was the largest schooner ever built, and the only seven-masted schooner ever built. She was a pure sailing vessel, with no auxiliary power. The pinnacle of sailing technology, she was completed in 1902, and sailed until 1907, when she was wrecked off the coast of the Celtic Isles of Scilly, with the loss of all crew members. Only the captain and the engineer survived. Badger’s oil on canvas painting of the Lawson, done in 1906, sold for about $70,000 at auction in 2002.

But you’ll probably never find a Badger oil on canvas ship portrait for less money than this next one, or one in worse condition, with numerous tears and a veritable snowstorm of paint loss. It showed the three-masted schooner Maggie S. Hart, flying an American flag, with eight crew members aboard. The Hart, 679 tons, was built in Waldoboro, Maine, in 1885 and sailed until late 1909. On October 29th, 1889, she collided with a barge near the Shovelful lightship off the coast of Cape Cod, and was also badly damaged by fire sometime prior to 1907. On December 18th of 1909, she left the port of Jacksonville, Florida, with a crew of eight, and vanished without a trace, presumably another victim of the so-called Bermuda Triangle. William Stubbs (1842-1909) also painted the Hart, and that work sold at Thomaston Place Auction Galleries in 2007 for $20,900, along with some ship’s papers from her first year. Comparable Badgers usually outsell Stubbs. But this one needed lots of Tender Loving Care to bring it up into the big time. Nevertheless, an intrepid and farsighted buyer took a chance on the painting, in “barn-found” condition for $2185.

©Maine Antique Digest

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