Artists Harbour and Art from Britain have moved to offices in Southsea (see Contact us for more details).

Visitors are welcome, by appointment.

From our new address we continue to operate –

• Our art publishing business
• Fine art reprographics services to artists – large picture copying through our high-resolution scanner, archiving, giclee printmaking and card printing
• Our online gallery and web shop

We are looking for a perfect location for a new retail gallery and will re-open Artists Harbour Gallery in the bricks-and-mortar world when we find the right place.

If you need to contact us, our phone number and email addresses remain the same.

Thank you for your support.

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We now have giclee prints available from the fabulous new picture of HMS Victory by Portsmouth’s artist Chris N. Wood. As you may know if you read our newsletter, Chris started this picture following a suggestion of someone in the Ministry of Defence. The idea behind that truly gorgeous small-scale oil painting of HMS Victory (Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar), was to create a truly iconic image of the Royal Navy.

We’ve now scanned the original oil painting before it gets sent to its new owner, a collector from Portugal who bought the picture while Chris was working on it in our gallery during a reception.

Chris was born in Suffolk in 1952. He studied at Ipswich School of Art followed by a post graduate year at Wimbledon School of Art. This led to working as a graphic designer in central London, running a successful yacht chandlery and working freelance as a fine artist and illustrator. He has taught fine art in a number of colleges and institutions and currently teaches full time at St Vincent College in Gosport. His work is multi-disciplinary, often biographical and reflects his varied interests. Drawing is central to his practice, as are the relationship of line and form.

Chris is passionate about the sea and this is a recurring theme in both his two and three-dimensional work.

He has been a member of Art Space, Portsmouth for the last ten years and has exhibited painting and sculpture both in his native East Anglia and along the South coast.

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George Cruikshank (1792-1878), was a noted cartoonist with a biting line in sarcasm and political satire. He was also the first illustrator of Oliver Twist, one of the greatest novels penned by his close friend, Charles Dickens, with such memorable pictures as ‘Oliver Asking For More’, and ‘Fagin In The Condemned Cell’. Their friendship ended when, later in life, the cartoonist became a passionate advocate for the temperance movement while Dickens remained opposed. Cruikshank was considered a great enough artist to be exhumed from his original burial place in order to be re-buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, London.

Wikipedia notes that “Cruikshank’s work included a personification of England named John Bull who was developed from about 1790 in conjunction with other British satirical artists such as James Gillray, and Thomas Rowlandson.” Gilray was one of his major influences and Cruikshank eventually replaced him as England’s most popular satirist.

Cruikshank’s series of 8 naval-themed cartoons lampoon prominent figures in military and political life. The cartoons, each labelled with a Plate number from No.1 to No.8, chronicle the career in the Royal Navy of Master Blockhead, who starts as a Midshipman. Our reproduction prints of the series were taken from original Victorian engraved editions and watercoloured for us by a skilled artist. The colours used were based on the colours in a set of the same cartoons in the Royal Naval Museum, Portsmouth, England. Our prints are reproduced by the giclee process using long-life archival quality materials.

These 8 naval cartoons and Frontispiece constitute The Sailors Progress series and are available from Artists Harbour webshop.

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The artist William Lionel Wyllie RA was a dominant talent in British maritime art from the end of the 19th century until well into the 20th. His works are on display not only in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard at the Royal Naval Museum and here at Artists Harbour Gallery, but also at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, Tate Britain as well as other collections.

Wyllie was born in London in 1851 and became famous and successful through painting maritime scenes in both oil and watercolour, many of which he published as editions of etchings. Wyllie himself created the etchings from his own pictures.
His name spread, along with that of Charles Dixon, when he worked as an illustrator in the late Victorian era for the popular illustrated tabloids, The Graphic and the Illustrated London News.

A notable Wyllie artwork is a picture (”Come to Southsea and Board the Old Ship”) showing public access to Britain’s iconic 18th-century warship, HMS Victory, on which Admiral Lord Nelson died while leading the great 1805 defeat at Trafalgar of Napoleon’s ambitions to invade Britain. This picture is also for sale here.

Wyllie was a prime mover in the public campaign to get HMS Victory moved from lying idly out in the waters of Portsmouth Harbour on the English south coast to her current position in dry dock as a visitor attraction at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, just a few yards from where current RN aircraft carriers and other warships come and go. She is now one of Britain’s favourite tourist attractions and is only a few yards from the remains of Tudor Warship Mary Rose. HMS Victory remains a serving warship in the Royal Navy and is the flagship of Britain’s Second Sea Lord.

Despite his failing eyesight and old age, near the end of his life Wyllie pushed himself to the limit physically and mentally to create the massive, 42ft.-wide semi-circular Panorama of the Battle of Trafalgar which can still be seen today in the Royal Naval Museum.

Artists Harbour sells original Wyllie etchings, modern reproduction prints of a number of Wyllie’s etchings and watercolours, greetings cards reproducing some of Wyllie’s works and DVDs about Wyllie. Go to Wyllie’s page on our webshop to see all the artworks we have in stock.

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The unidentified flying object seen at high altitude over England’s South Coast a week ago has at last been identified… it was actually 16 multi-coloured, giant helium-filled balloons flying in formation, each one towing a long ribbon tied to a postcard from Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.
“I was amazed how the balloons stayed together as a close group at least 10 miles after they were released in the strong breeze, and how long we could see them with the naked eye,” said Artists Harbour art gallery director Leon Reis.

“They looked like a bunch of polka dots and within two minutes they were still completely visible, very high in the sky and speeding past Chichester, heading southeast over the English Channel and looking set to reach France within the hour,” said Leon. “At one point I started to worry about a high-flying light aircraft that appeared to be in their path”.

The balloons were let go by a sales team from the pharmaceutical giant Glaxo SmithKline, who had hired the Grade 1-listed art gallery in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard for a team-building awayday.

One of their exercises had involved each of the 16 team members writing observations about the team on a postcard of HMS Victory. What the team members didn’t know was that the postcards would be collected, addressed back to them and stamped, then laminated to make them waterproof. Finally, a hole was punched in each encapsulated card for a ribbon to attach it to a helium-filled balloon. The surprise climax of the day was for everybody to release their balloons and send them sailing into the sky, with a prize for anybody who eventually gets their own postcard back through the post.

Disaster nearly struck when the helium balloons, arranged from London, were delivered and were found not to have enough helium in them to even lift one postcard. But a quick call from Artists Harbour to Portsmouth city centre novelty shop Uneedus saved the day… within an hour they had provided 16 huge balloons, each 60cm wide BEFORE inflation, pumped up tight with helium.

“When they were blown up the balloons were so big I could only get five at a time into the back of my big Volvo estate car, even with the seats down,” said Leon. “I thought they might lift me off the ground, let alone a postcard”.

The team released the balloons between HMS Victory and HMS Ark Royal, berthed a few yards away in HM Naval Base.

If any ever of the British-stamped postcards ever make it back from France to Glaxo SmithKline’s London HQ, Artists Harbour promises to let you know. If they don’t make it, perhaps complaints on a postcard to the EU would be appropriate?

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