File talk:John Thomas-Serres - The Spanish Frigate ‘San Carlos’ off Port Mahon (cropped).png

The Spanish Frigate ‘San Carlos’ off Port Mahon

I would be grareful for your thoughts on this picture, File:ARC Amilcar.png? which I have nominated for renaming. It was cropped from File:John Thomas-Serres - The Spanish Frigate ‘San Carlos’ off Port Mahon.jpg. Broichmore (talk) 11:23, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

@Broichmore: Not sure exactly what the question is... from your description, there was no ship named "San Carlos" (which would have been the ship-of-the-line also depicted, and not the frigate in this detail anyways). It's always hard to tell if paintings were meant to be of specific ships, or were just figments of imagination. Some could be mainly symbolic, depicting something that did not actually happen as shown but got the point across for something that did. Or some may depict a specific event/ship, but the fringe details were invented. I don't think the Spanish Navy was very large in 1814, so it should be possible to figure out the possible ships-of-the-line extant at that date, and maybe find out if they ever visited Minorca. I would probably prefer not to perpetuate the name "San Carlos" in filenames if that is known to be incorrect. I would also like to see why the other ship was identified as "Amilcar", which was not given, although it can be difficult for non-speakers to search effectively for such things, so maybe it's obvious despite my not being able to find it with a quick search. So... hard to know what to do given not a lot of information. Carl Lindberg (talk) 14:07, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Yes its a problem. I'm at a loss myself. The Spanish Frigate ‘San Carlos’ off Port Mahon is the title given to the piece by the artist. So no choice there. The majority of Serres pictures, like the Dutch, don't name the ship,; but here he does. Serres has a reputation for accuracy, geographically at least. All this information about Amilcar is unsourced. Presumably the contributor was talking about the Punic general en:Hamilcar Barca. You will notice that the cropped picture was uploaded without a satisfactory source. I found the missing source? and original picture today. I'm reticent about leaving this unsourced information attached to the file, unless we can find some corroboration for it. Shall we delete the extra stuff? The only corroborated information here is the name of the picture and the artist. Broichmore (talk) 14:48, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Commons doesn't have the same sourcing rules as Wikipedia, so may as well leave it -- whether the image is used in articles elsewhere is up to those projects, if the information is good enough for them. The caption does say that there was a frigate named Amilcar named after the figure you linked. They may well be right, so I would not want to remove it. List of ships of the line of Spain does actually list a San Carlos ship of the line, launched 1765, and not broken up until 1819, so it could be that ship I guess (would have been a three-decker at the time). Maybe there is documentation somewhere on the ship that accompanied it. Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:50, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Okay. I'll follow your lead. I have however made some tweaks to the file on the basis that I've never known the artist to have dealt out fantasy names before. If he doesn't know the name of a ship, he just doesn't name it. I think its the Spaniard you mention. Broichmore (talk) 18:20, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

OK, if the artist had that reputation, I'm sure it is that San Carlos which is depicted (in the full painting, not this crop -- I removed the "named San Carlos" category from this crop). We would need to find some documentation on the visit, and which frigate went with the San Carlos, to know which one this is. Carl Lindberg (talk) 03:52, 1 July 2021 (UTC)