Images of transgressive sailors

When I was at the Edward Burra exhibition in Chichester last month (it's still on) I thought some of the very curvaceous and transgressive images of seafarers looked familiar in style. He definitely knew about trannies, but was he the first to visually comment on seafarers' sexuality?

I thought not, and now I've come across some paintings of mariners that seem to precede his. Try this 1929 painting by Austrian artist Marcel Ronay (lower image), 'Sailor and Girl'.(I found the image at http://bjws.blogspot.com/2011/04/new-western-woman-of-1920s.html. Thank you, Barbara).

Surfing for more info about Ronay led to me another site where you will find many Weimar artists' images of 'sailors', of the kind not usually seen in maritime museums, for example Charles Demuth's 1918 'Sailors dancing' (centre). http://weimarart.blogspot.com/2010/08/pleasures-of-mariners.html

Their sexualisation in these images is quite startling. It's easy to see the connections with Tom of Finland (see top picture, Seen Magazine, 'Tom arrives home') and his masculine gay men. Real name Touko Laaksonen, the late Tom's internationally acclaimed exhibition at Turku just closed 4 days ago. It was one of the official events in Turku's European Capital of Culture programme.

However the Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art and the Åbo Akademi Library want to gather permanent collections of his work). http://www.turku2011.fi/en/news/tom-of-finland-collections-gathered-turku_en-0).

There is certainly room in the world for a maritime museum to show this very different angle on rugged Sailor Jack.

Jill Tar or Jack Tar under those clothes?

It's rather funny that the very day the world's e-media comes up with TWO stories about women seafarers' successes in modern times, I get information about how their counterparts fared 150 years earlier. You absolutely had to be mistake-able for a lad, if you wanted a job at sea.
In her stunningly commodious online treasure trove my friend Helena Wojtczak has put no less than 13 original 19C newspaper stories of women seafarers who crossed dressed to get work at sea. See them at http://www.facebook.com/l/e757cYSCwGjZPCKYdUHJ4TAHyhg/www.historyofwomen.org/sailors.html
Perhaps best of all, it was joked that every Jack Tar might really be Jill - not transsexual or transvestite but absolutely born female.
On March 25 1843 The Examiner said that 2-3 years earlier - ie 1840 - 'there was a great run on female sailors. Every newspaper has its paragraph announcing the discovery of a female sailor.
'The result was a thorough conviction in the public mind that all sailors were female sailors - that there were no other sailors than female sailors in disguise; and now the curiosity would be the discovery of a male sailor, if such a phenomenon could be well authenticated.'

Women on sailing ships 1650-1850 / Black sailors

Through my Google Alerts system I've found an interesting web forum, with a subsection about women on sailing ships. Go to http://forum.sailingnavies.com, then go to 'Women at sea.' The site was mainly active 2003-2008, but it's still viable.

Some of the women discussed are cross-dressing sailors, some are wives of officers, two are mothers who gave birth at sea while their husbands were in Nelson's navy; Nelly Giles on HMS Bellerophon at the Battle of the Nile, 1798, and Louisa Phelan on HMS Swallow in June 1812.

They may have known the two women whom Thomas Maclise represented in his 1860s painting, The Death of Nelson. I was looking at it in Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery last week.

I noticed that of the three 'nurses', the central one is a man. But he's looking very tender. I wondered if the artist gave some thought as to how prominent a woman should be - and decided against it.

The Walker website has an interesting article about how Maclise based his painting on real details of the Victory's complement in 1805. "The inclusion of two black people in the scene - a seaman in the centre of the painting and a cook to the left - was in part a matter of historical accuracy. The Victory's master book of 1805 refers to a small number of foreigners amongst crew members and mentioned that "some must have been Negroes � Two give Africa as their birthplace".

The black seaman plays a key role in the painting not just because he is in the centre, but because he points to Lord Nelson's assassin as well. The black seaman is not a symbol of "otherness" or difference of identity and culture; rather his presence serves to strengthen British identity.

Like other historical paintings, "The Death of Nelson" not only commemorates an important event, but also fulfils a didactic purpose: the representation of black people and women together with Lord Nelson suggests that Victorian society was a harmonious whole, despite its class divisions and inequalities.

In reality 19th century black sailors in British fleets were poorly treated. Although they usually worked in the lower ranks of the ship's company as cooks, deck hands or stewards, they were not slaves but free sailors. The hardship of living at sea meant that the life of a sailor was less attractive and for this reason black people were easily accepted.

It is believed that towards the end of the 19th century a quarter of all seamen in the merchant navy were black. Black people at sea were not isolated by their white shipmates, but mixed both in work and in leisure time. Black seamen from West Africa, the West Indies and the United States were a particularly common sight in Liverpool."
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/picture-of-month/displaypicture.asp?venue=2&id=37