The subject
The Classic Wooden Sloop
A sloop is the simplest and, to many eyes, the most elegant of sailing boats: a single mast carrying a mainsail behind it and a triangular headsail in front.
Where a schooner spreads its canvas over two masts, a sloop puts everything on one. It is the rig of most sailing yachts today and of countless classics before them — efficient, close-winded, quick to answer the helm. Under a good breeze a sloop heels, digs in her shoulder and comes alive; the boat I drew is caught at exactly that moment, laid over and driving, the Italian ensign streaming from her stern.
A wooden sloop like this is built the slow way — a keel and steamed oak frames, planked in mahogany, fastened with bronze, decked in teak. Italy has one of the great names in the craft: the Sangermani yard at Lavagna, working since 1896, which built some of the most beautiful wooden yachts of the twentieth century, a handful at a time and entirely by hand. A boat like this is meant to outlive the people who sail her.
That is why the tricolore feels right at her stern. Italy loves these boats. Every June the classic fleet gathers at Porto Santo Stefano for the Argentario Sailing Week — vintage gaff- and Marconi-rigged yachts, meticulously restored, racing in the Tyrrhenian wind — and again at Imperia and along the coast. It is a whole world kept alive by people who refuse to let the old boats go.
So the drawing leans. The hull is a single dark stroke, the tall sail washed a cool grey, the rigging drawn taut in ink, and just a touch of red at the stern for the flag. Everything tilts; the sea is only a few blue marks to say she is moving. It is less a portrait of a particular boat than of the feeling of sailing one.
There is nothing a wooden sloop under sail needs to prove. She is simply, unarguably elegant — and that, in the end, is the whole of it.
See also · Sailing
The Elegance of a Classic Wooden Sailing Boat ·
the 2026 collection
