File:Hulks off Devonport RMG BHC1917.tiff

A panel painting showing a hulk, with a naval warship in commission moored alongside, in the Hamoaze anchorage off Devonport Dockyard. The covered slipways of the dockyard can be seen in the right distance together with another moored hulk, and one to far left. The principal hulk in the centre flies the Union flag as an ensign, and is decked in other flags and crowded with people on deck and coming aboard from boats alongside. The ship in commission moored abreast to the right flies the white ensign. To the left of both a brig is making sail in port-bow view. There is a small rowing boat in the foreground on the right, where a figure holds a rod over the side. A barrel floats on the surface on the left.

The composition clearly commemorates some occasion, presumably when a flag officer of the white squadron was the local commander-in-chief at Devonport, if the white ensign is indicative. However, what this was remains to be discovered.

The painting, which is on millboard, is inscribed on a standard engraved Winsor and Newton supplier's label the back ‘Oil painting by John Salmon’ in ink in an old but apparently 20th-century hand, and scrawled in pencil in a later one ‘Condy’. The Salmon attribution is an old mistake, not least since the work is signed with a reversed 'NC' on the red pennant flying at the mainmast of the brig shown. It is not, however, entirely certain whether this piece is by Nicholas Condy, who died in 1857, or his son Nicholas Matthew Condy, who predeceased him in 1851. They are difficult to separate but on balance of subject preference it is currently given to the father, though Archibald's 'Sea Painters' listed it as by Nicholas Matthew. The supplier label also bears a 19th-century ink inscription, transversely across one end, 'Mr Anthony / Duke St St James / last house/ JW [?], possibly an early delivery address