File:A Brig Leaving Dover RMG BHC1136.tiff

This painting shows a view of Dover from the sea with a brig sailing out towards the viewer. A fishing boat is making its way back in the opposite direction towards the harbour walls across the glassy, animated waves. A steamer in the background is following the brig. The painting exemplifies the early 19th-century interest in narrative detail, as can be seen in the colourful detail of the many staffage figures greeting each other, looking on and working on board the vessels.

George Chambers senior was born in Whitby, Yorkshire in 1803. At ten years of age he went to sea with his uncle. Following a five-year apprenticeship on board a transport brig, Chambers returned to Whitby and worked for a while as a house and ship painter before leaving to set up in London in 1825. There his work proved popular with a nautical clientele and won Chambers his early commissions, although he also worked as a scene painter. He secured the patronage of King William IV and Queen Adelaide in 1831–32 and thereafter Chambers was an established artist. He was a talented draughtsman and watercolourist and an accomplished painter in oils, often working with fluent, colourful bravura. He died in 1840.

This painting has long been attributed to Chambers senior but while in his type of palette it is not of his usual fluent quality in either draughtsmanship or painting. It might be early work except that the steamer included suggests it is from the mid-1830s at earliest, so it may in fact be by a follower. The 'DR' prominent on the gunwale of the boat in the foreground fishing boat has so far been assumed to stand for 'Dover': no likely painter of whom it may also be the initials has yet been identified, but that coincidence is not impossible and the sort of punning humour which appealed at the time.