The subject
The Classic Wooden Sailing Yacht
There is a particular beauty in an old wooden sailing yacht — long, low and bright with varnish, leaning into the wind under a tower of canvas.
The boat I drew is a schooner: two masts, the forward one shorter than the main, rigged fore-and-aft so she can sail close to the wind. It was the classic working-and-pleasure rig of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — fast, handsome and demanding of a good crew. A large gaff schooner under full sail is one of the finest sights at sea.
These yachts are built almost entirely of wood: an oak backbone, planking of larch, mahogany or teak, decks of pale scrubbed teak, spars of fir or spruce. Every plank is shaped by hand and fastened with bronze, and the brightwork is varnished and re-varnished. A wooden boat is less a manufactured object than a living thing that has to be tended — and that is part of the romance of it.
The warm colour of the sails in the drawing is not invented. Before synthetic cloth, sails were cotton or flax and would rot; to preserve them, sailmakers steeped the canvas in a “tan” — a brew of tree bark, ochre and oil — that turned it a deep reddish-brown. Those “tanbark” sails are still made for classic yachts today, as much for their beauty now as for protection.
For much of the twentieth century such boats were left to rot, too costly to keep. Then, from the 1980s, came a revival: old yachts were painstakingly restored, and a whole calendar of classic regattas grew up around them — Saint-Tropez, Cannes, Antibes — where hundred-year-old schooners race again in the Mediterranean sun.
So my drawing is nearly all ink: the standing and running rigging traced line by line, the sails washed in that warm ochre “tan”, the hull a single dark stroke, and just enough blue to float her. What I wanted was the elegance — the lean of the hull, the geometry of the sails against the sky.
See also · Sailing
A Classic Wooden Sloop under Sail ·
the 2026 collection
