Schooner Yacht MERLIN, Castle Hill Light, Newport, RI, 1906

oil on canvas, 24” x 44” (framed dimensions: 30” x 50”)

$30,000

90-foot Schooner MERLIN, was designed by Edward Burgess(1848–1891) , the sister to SACHEM, built for William H. Forbes in 1889, and the next year she won the Puritan Cup. The owners of these big schooners delighted in racing the fishermen and pilot boats on a breezy afternoon offshore. In the course of winning the New York Yacht Club’s Goelet Cup in 1892, as her owner’s son related in the Ditty Box, MERLIN had rounded the windward mark, and they were runnning up the spinnaker, except that “when it was about twenty feet up, the Swede who was hoisting , said, ‘Ho!’ Ho!’ Dat ain’t the spinnaker, dat’s the awning"‘ - a proceesing which did not especially please my father who was steering.”