Stephen Howarth, who contributed the text to accompany Joseph Wheatleys plates in Historic Sail, writes about Joseph Wheatley and his art:
"This is a very special, very unusual book, made all the more remarkable by the fact that its artist-historian Joseph Wheatley is entirely self-taught. Now and then, someone somewhere apparently a perfectly ordinary person conducting a perfectly normal life breaks the mould and, from a private passion, produces an outstanding and completely unexpected body of work. Wheatley is such a man, because after a career in the Fire Service he changed his life completely and devoted himself to the study and graphic reconstruction of historic sailing ships. The ninety-one full-colour plates selected for this stunning volume represent just a part of his resulting work.
Over the years he created for his own pleasure a large and still growing collection of highly detailed, intricate reconstructive drawings, ranging from the very earliest sailing ships to those of the 20th century. Only his family and friends saw the developing collection: initially he had no thought of publication, and apart from curators in maritime museums across Europe, from Britain to Greece, no one in the maritime historical world had the slightest idea of his vocation. But as the collection mounted into the hundreds, publication began to be discussed. The question then was to find a publisher bold enough to undertake the challenge and expense of full-colour reproduction in a large format. Happily he did, with Lionel Leventhal, and now maritime historians and enthusiasts can welcome a new and unsuspected talent onto the scene.
Joseph Wheatley was born in Houghton-le-Spring in 1937, and has lived almost all his life in the north-east of England. After leaving school his first job was in the sweet factory founded by his great-grandfather. National Service with the Royal Artillery then took him to London. Returning to the north-east in 1958, he joined the Fire Service. It was a demanding, often dangerous and sometimes harrowing career, yet extremely satisfying. He became devoted to it, but the physical rigours took their toll, and in 1986, after twenty-eight years of lifting bodies and breathing smoke and toxic fumes, his accumulated service injuries forced him into premature retirement.
In such a situation still only 49 years old but unable to work in regular full-time employment many people would face the future with despondency or even despair. Joseph deeply regretted having to leave the service he had enjoyed for so long, but where others might have seen only emptiness ahead, he saw opportunity. If the future was a blank page, he would paint on it.
As a schoolboy he had often cycled with two friends to a bridge over the river Wear in Sunderland. The bridge gave an excellent view of the river and docks, always crowded with shipping, and the three lads would take paper and pencils to sketch the vessels below. One day the mother of another boy (herself a successful commercial artist) gave them a challenge: try drawing a Spanish galleon much more difficult than a modern ship.
Nowadays Joseph regards that childhood challenge as the day this book began, because of course the first problem was to find out exactly what a galleon looked like; and as he discovered, finding out the exact appearance of ships of a long-gone age is far easier said than done. He also gradually discovered the great variety of types of sailing ships that used to grace the seas, and he had to learn a whole new vocabulary, the mariners vocabulary, which to unaccustomed people can be as impenetrable as a foreign language.
In off-duty hours during his London-based period of National Service, he visited Greenwich repeatedly and began studying the famous clipper ship Cutty Sark, as well as exploring the endless treasures – the models, plans, paintings and library – of the National Maritime Museum. In that period too came the first of many visits to Portsmouth. Its naval dockyard was already home to the Royal Naval Museum and the oldest commissioned warship in the world, Nelsons dry-docked flagship HMS Victory (1765), and was greatly enhanced in later years when, as Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, it also became the showcase for HMS Warrior (1860) and the evocative and invaluable remains of Britain's sole surviving Tudor warship Mary Rose (1510).
There has been no book like this since Björn Landström's ground-breaking volume The Ship (1961) and its concise successor Sailing Ships (1969). Since then, much new information has become available with more recent research and the discovery and raising of more and more historic wrecks. In his own researches, Joseph Wheatley returned wherever possible to original sources. In building his own conclusions he found, like Landström, that in the absence of proof positive, where the evidence is literally sketchy, such conclusions must to an extent be speculative informed guesses. Where a degree of uncertainty exists over the reconstruction of a given ship, it is noted in the accompanying captions and remains open to discussion. Scholars will find Historic Sail a valuable part of the continuing process of historical reconstruction, and everyone with an interest in the great age of sail will take great pleasure in the artistry of this extraordinary and beautiful book. In merchant shipping and armed navies, steampower or nuclear power has largely taken the place of sail. But with strong continuing amateur and professional historical research, with yachts built for leisure and racing, and with the practical elegance of sail-training Tall Ships, millions of people around the world are still fascinated by sail. The story of the sailing ship has not ended yet."
Historic Sail, with text by Stephen Howarth and 91 colour plates by Joseph Wheatley, will be published in April, priced £ 40.00.
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