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Magazine Antiques, August, 1996 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

Twins, the Bard brothers were born in New York City in 1815, the year Robert Fulton, whose steamboat transformed American shipping, died. They worked together for a number of years, portraying the many and varied vessels plying New York's waterways in the 1830s and 1840s, from racing yachts to commuter ferries, paddlewheelers to schooners. While their renderings of the boats themselves are always meticulously detailed, the backgrounds - water, sky, and landscape elements - often possess a whimsical quality that transcends the Bards' lack of professional training and places the paintings in a category all their own.

In the 1850s John Bard basically dropped out of sight and in October 1856 he died in the care of the AlmsHouse on Blackwell's Island in New York's East River. James Bard, meanwhile, carried on alone, taking full advantage of the phenomenal growth in shipbuilding at the time by painting hundreds of the important vessels being launched and developing a clientele of the most eminent steamboat barons. His compositions became more varied in terms of content and color - sometimes subtle, sometimes dynamic - while still retaining the attention to detail that makes them such valuable records.

The paintings illustrated here are typical of James Bard's finest period, between 1850 and 1870. The earlier (above), painted in 1854 and now in the collection of the New York State Historical Association, depicts the C.P. Smith, a small (104 feet long), steam-driven tugboat launched a year earlier by Benjamin C. Terry of Keyport, New Jersey. It was named for Cyrus Porter Smith (1800-1877), the fourth mayor of Brooklyn (the first elected by popular vote), who held that office from 1839 to 1841.

Another Terry ship, the steamboat Seawanhaka, is the subject of the other painting illustrated here, recently acquired by the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities. Built in 1866 for the Long Island North Shore Freight and Transportation Company, the Seawanhaka was considered a first, light-height commuter steamer. She would leave Pecks Slip in the East River daily at 3:15 P.M. and return the next morning from Roslyn, Long Island, making stops at Glen Wood, Mott's Dock, Glen Cove, Sands Point, Great Neck, Baylis' Dock, and Whitestone. In the background of Bard's painting is the vessel the Seawanhaka replaced on this run, the T.V. Arrowsmith, which subsequently became an excursion boat on the Potomac River.

The Seawanhaka was lost on June 28, 1880, when a furnace backdraft sent coals flying into the engine room, setting it afire. All but forty of the three hundred passengers were saved thanks to the heroic efforts of the captain, Charles P. Smith (1826-1881), who stayed at the wheel and ran the boat aground on the flats off Ward's Island. Among the survivors were William Russell Grace, soon to become the mayor of New York City; the newspaper editor Charles A. Dana; and the publisher John Harper. The captain himself never fully recovered from injuries sustained in the fire and died a year later. His memorial service, presided over by Grace, is said to have been attended by three thousand mourners.