Saturday, 14 October 2017

The mystery of the Ramsgate painting of Kennett Beacham Martin.

These three paintings of Ramsgate Harbour have recently appeared on the internet as © Ramsgate Library and ascribed to the artist Kennett Beacham Martin and all dated 1821.
 Picture 1

 Picture 2

Picture 3

Obviously as the Ramsgate Harbour we have now, inner basin, outer harbour, east pier west pier, east pier extension were all completed by 1791, while these paintings could have been painted in 1821 they all show the harbour as it would have looked before 1750. 
This picture of Ramsgate says on it that it was printed in 1791 and as you can see it was drawn from up on the end of the pier near the lighthouse.

 Ok something is wrong here either Kennett Beacham Martin painted them all in 1821 and they were paintings of how he imagined the harbour to have been before 1750, or they were painted by different people at different times, any ideas anyone. I have labelled them pictures 1, 2 and 3 and will have a go at putting some answers below.
When it comes to old paintings of Ramsgate I think the authenticity of this one which is ascribed to Benjamin West and thought to date from 1788 is ok, I should point out that it isn’t signed or dated.

 Charles Busson in The Book of Ramsgate describes picture 3 as “The new East Pier from the old harbour Oil painting 1751.(KLC)”
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2 comments:

  1. PeterOctober 14, 2017 8:46 pm

    I think they could have been painted by three different people. The styles definitely look different.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ben KellyApril 09, 2021 10:41 pm

    Are these the famous pictures found in the cellar of Ramsgate Library in 1934? Interesting. K. B. Martin was born in 1788, maybe he didn't paint them.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.