Harriet Quimby
Harriet Quimby is shown flying her Blériot XI monoplane over the white cliffs of Dover on the morning of 16 April 1912, at the start of her crossing of the English Channel. The tiny, open-cockpit aircraft passes above the chalk cliffs, the patchwork landscape of Kent falling away into haze below, with nothing between the pilot and the French coast but 22 miles of open water and a 50-horsepower Gnome rotary engine.
Harriet Quimby departed from Dover in foggy conditions and landed on the beach at Hardelot, near Boulogne, after a flight of 59 minutes. Her achievement was overshadowed in the press by the sinking of the Titanic just the day before, and Quimby herself was killed in a flying accident barely two months later, aged 37.
This was my first aviation oil painting. It won a pair of awards at the Guild of Aviation Artists Annual Exhibition 2025 and was sold at the show.
The research the painting was built on
For this painting, I drew initially on the plans of the Bleriot XI: these can be used directly to draw the aircraft out in perspective. From there, the present day flying examples were good reference, filling in detail and giving a real picture of the plane up in the sky. Reference to contemporary photographs - including in newspaper cuttings - allows me to check the specifics of Harriet Quimby's plane for this flight.
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