Immaculate watercolour

Press, 23 April 1987, Page 21

Immaculate watercolour

About two years ago, Canterbury Museum was presented with a very pleasing watercolour depicting the Terra Nova in Antarctica in 1912. The story of the painting concerns two members of Captain Robert Scott’s last voyage. One was Herbert Ponting, the expedition’s photographer, who made a magnificent record of the men, ship, sledging teams, dogs, wildlife and icy scenery under extremely difficult conditions.

The other was the ship’s doctor, Surgeon Commander Murray Levick, R.N., who was one of the six members of the expedition’s “Northern Party” which in January, 1912, was left at a point on the Victoria Land Coast to conduct geological and other surveys. While they were there, unseasonable weather froze the sea for 30 miles out, making it impossible for the men to be picked up in February as prearranged. As the winter set in, they were given up for lost. The story of their experiences in an ice-cave, with a pitifully small supply of food, and their long and desperate journey on foot back to the expedition’s base camp pulling a sick man on a sledge as well as all their scientific records, is now almost legendary. Incredibly, they all survived. In 1930, Commander Levick was medical superintendent of the Heritage Craft School and

BY

Hospital for crippled children at Chailey, Sussex. He was scheduled to give a lecture on penguins at a fund-raising event at the Polytechnic Hall in Upper Regent Street, London, so he took one of Herbert Pontin’s photogaphs, a study of Terra Nova in the ice, to Charles Padday, R.A., asking him to make a painting from it, which could be auctioned at the meeting. He described the colours of the scene to the artist, and the finished watercolour, measuring 390 x 490 mm, was,framed and prepared for sale.

Buyer returned painting

On the night, it was duly sold for a bid of £lO. Magnanimously, the purchaser promptly gave the painting back to the organising committee. A young woman who was selling programmes, Nancy Carver, took advantage of the opportunity to buy it for. herself, paying the committee £l2. In 1984, Miss Carver, by then in her 80s and living in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, offered the watercolour to the Canterbury Museum for its Antarctic collection. It arrived in immaculate condition and, happily, still in its original, blue-and-gold art-deco, frame.

JOAN WOODWARD