Flying Cloud - limited edition print

Custom framing is available for this print.  Please call 800-850-1776 or email info@mortkunstler.com for more information.

LIMITED EDITION PRINTS
Giclée Canvas Prints
Reproduction technique: Giclées are printed with the finest archival pigmented inks on canvas. Each print is numbered and signed by the artist and accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity.

Classic Edition 21” x 23”
Signed & Numbered • Edition Size: 100

Historical Information

The clipper ship had a short but glorious life, from the mid-1840’s, when steamboats and railroads took over. The first clippers were built in Baltimore, but that industry–and art–shifted quickly to New England. Samuel Hall, who had worked in shipyards in Marshfield, had served his apprenticeship building schooners for the fishing and opium trade. In the spring of 1850, he launched his first clipper from his shipyard in East Boston. But the greatest of ship designers and builders was Donald McKay, who in that same year launched the Stag Hound, the first of many clipper ships he built. In 1851 he built what was called the noblest and most beautiful ship ever built: the Flying Cloud – ­229 feet in length and forty in breadth. With her sky-sail rising 200 feet from the deck she was not only a thing of beauty, she was also the fastest ship afloat. On her maiden voyage she logged 374 nautical miles the first day out; she rounded Cape Horn and made San Francisco in eighty-nine days, a record never surpassed by a sailboat. The Flying Cloud, whose birth coincided with the discovery of gold in California, played a role in the history of that state. It was faster – and safer – to sail around Cape Horn than to go overland from Mississippi.

The Flying Cloud wrote a chapter, too, in the history of maritime Massachusetts, for it continued the famous China Trade inaugurated by Captain Gray in 1782, and brought both wealth and the Chinese culture to that most cosmopolitan of American cities, Boston.