USA, CANADA

East Coast

“You try to resist it, but you’ve always reproduced boats, at a later stage, in your sketchbooks. The beauty of the boat silhouettes that you had the chance to observe during your travels…”

Jean de Loisy

Abstracts

(…) Literature strikes again: Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous, a novel in which ships and their crews make up the backdrops and heroes. The film by Victor Fleming, based on Kipling’s book, was Éric Tabarly’s favorite. Éric often mentioned it when we went sailing.

(…) Sir Thomas Lipton created the International Fisherman’s Trophy. A trophy exclusively for schooners from the Great Banks that had weathered at least one profitable fishing season. The Trophy whetted the imaginations of skippers and constructers, and topped off what is widely considered to be the climax of Western “working sailboats” that concluded in the 1920s-1930s with the advent of the engine.

The mythical Canadian schooner Bluenose dominated competitions for years. (…) I had the pleasure of drawing the perfect replica of it that is moored in Lunenburg, and that remains Canada’s great glory. For the record, many years later, it was namely the Bluenose, measuring 44 meters long, which inspired me to set up the Jules Verne Trophy (with Florence Arthaud in 1992), and to construct the Tag Heuer racing prototype, a schooner measuring… 44 meters to take up this challenge. It goes to show that as well as Gauguin, I’ve always dreamed of being Captain Courageous!

Extract from Œuvres vagabondes, 2016, Éditions Gallimard