File:Ships Through the Ages - Robert Fulton's Clermont.jpg

English: BPLDC no.: 09_03_000076

Subtitle: Robert Fulton's Clermont

Creator: King, Frederic Leonard (American painter and illustrator, 1879-1947)

Date created: 1934-1935

General format: oil on canvas

Dimensions: visible image 22 ½ x 34 in., framed 25 ½ x 37 in.

BPL Department: Special Collections, East Boston Branch Library

Description: In the year 1807, the Clermont, named after the country home of a friend of Fulton's, proceeded from New York to Albany under its own steam, a distance of 130 miles in 30 hours. Fulton's Clermont was not the first steamboat. In 1785, John Fitch of South Windsor, Connecticut, completed a small steamboat, which made a successful trip on the Delaware River in 1787. He also built several larger steamships, one of which ran as a passenger boat between Philadelphia and Trenton in the summer of 1790. The United States Congress officially recognized Fitch in 1926 when it appropriated $15,000 to build a small memorial to him at Bardstown, Kentucky, where he died in 1798.

Notes: The description above was written in 1935. Ships Through the Ages, originally four murals painted by Frederic Leonard King between 1934 and 1935, was commissioned as part of the Public Works Art Project for the Jeffries Point Branch of the Boston Public Library. In 1956, the Jeffries Point Branch closed, and each mural was divided into multiple paintings and relocated to the East Boston Branch Library where they are currently on display; however, several sections of the murals are missing.