Calshot Spit
The Calshot Spit lightship is shown at her station on Southampton Water at sunset, her red hull and white lettering silhouetted against the warm sky - a familiar sight to anyone entering or leaving the port between 1951 and 1987. The wider format emphasises the long, low profile of the vessel and the wide horizontal sweep of the Solent horizon.
Calshot Spit lightship was stationed off the end of Calshot Spit to guide ships and flying boats into Southampton Water and warn of the extensive sandbanks at the entrance to the channel. A crew of six manned her at all times. She was replaced by an automated navigation buoy in 1987 and spent years on display in Ocean Village marina before being moved to the Eastern Docks in 2010. Saved from scrapping in 2019, she is now preserved at the Solent Sky museum in Southampton.
The painting captures the vessel in her working life: alone at her station, performing the quiet, essential function that lightships fulfilled for over a century before automation made them redundant as a distant ship fades into the sunset on the far right horizon. Exhibited and sold at the Royal Society of Marine Artists exhibition in 2021.
The research the painting was built on
For this painting, I was able to directly view Calshot Spit at the Solent Sky Museum in Southampton. I was also able to find photography and footage contemporary to the vessel's service off the spit to get get a sense of what Calshot Spit would have looked like on the water.
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