Gordon Grant

Gordon Grant is most famous for his maritime drawings and paintings. He was born in 1875 in San Francisco and was sent to school in Scotland as a youth. The voyage by sailing vessel around the southern tip of South America and then across the Atlantic made a tremendous impression on the young Grant and started a lasting fascination with the sea and sailing ships.

He studied art in London and returned to San Francisco to work on both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Examiner. This was the period of the artist/reporter with on-the-spot drawings being made on battlefields and warfronts. The Boer War and the Mexican Revolution were both grist for his artistic mill and his images appeared also in Harper's Weekly in New York.

His fame as a painter of ships was greatly enhanced in 1926 when prints of his painting of the U.S.S. Constitution were sold by the thousands to help raise money for the preservation of that historic vessel. It was destined for a fate as a target for Naval trainees when Grant, along with Eric Pape and many others, successfully lobbied Congress for restoration and designation as a National monument. His painting of the ship now hangs in the Oval Office at the White House. He later reprised his interest in the Constitution with the illustrations for Eagle of the Sea - The Story of Old Ironsides in 1949.