~ Late 19th Century Oil Of HMS Inflexible ~
A charming semi naive oil painting of the Victorian turreted battleship HMS Inflexible off a sea fort in the Solent. The piece is single mounted and sits in modern gold tone frame.
~ HMS Inflexible ~
HMS Inflexible was a Victorian ironclad battleship carrying her main armament in centrally placed turrets. The ship was constructed in the 1870s for the Royal Navy to oppose the perceived growing threat from the Italian Regia Marina in the Mediterranean.
The Italian Navy had started constructing a pair of battleships, Duilio and Dandolo, equipped with four Armstrong 15-inch (381 mm) guns weighing 35 tons each. These were superior to the armament of any ship in the British Mediterranean Squadron, and Inflexible was designed as a counter to them.
Packed with innovations, Inflexible mounted larger guns than those of any previous British warship and had the thickest armour ever to be fitted to a Royal Navy ship. Controversially, she was designed so that if her un-armoured ends should be seriously damaged in action and become water-logged, the buoyancy of the armoured centre section of the ship would keep her afloat and upright.
The ship was the first major warship to depend in part for the protection of her buoyancy by a horizontal armoured deck below the water-line rather than armoured sides along the waterline.
~ Dimensions ~
The frame has a width of 21 inches (53.5 cm), a height of 16.25 inches (41 cm) and a depth of 1 inch (2.5 cm).
The painting has a width of 12.75 inches (32.5 cm) and a height of 7.5 inches (19 cm).
The total weight is 1.8 kg.
~ Condition ~
The painting is in decent condition. There is some cracking to the paint in several areas. The is excellent.
