This oil on canvas is titled After A Gale, it was painted by William Trost Richards (1833-1905) in 1903 and purchased by the museum in the same year. Trost was an American artist from Philadelphia who was influenced by John Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelites. In the 1870s he began to devote his attention to marine painting and travelled to Europe in search of dramatic coastal scenery – including the UK, France and Norway.

The painting was selected by the Harris LGBTQ group to feature in the LGBT+ History Month Trail in 2019 and 2020. Phil, a member of the group, wrote the following interpretation inspired by their response to the painting:

“I have chosen this painting because it is one of the finest in the Harris collection. For me it is also an unwitting symbol of the unwritten history of gay culture and the sea. Churchill famously referred to the Navy as ‘nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash’ – even though homosexuality was illegal in the military until 2000.

Pirate ships were another male dominated, maritime world. Before the Reformation, people attracted to others of their own gender might have joined a monastery or nunnery. From the 1550s men who didn’t fit in might have been attracted by piracy. It was a masculine world in which same sex relationships were tolerated and celebrated.”