(click image to enlarge)
There are at least two other versions of the present drawing, one of which, in the collections of the Yale Center for British Art, is dated 1791. This date makes it highly likely that the current drawing was produced while Thomas Rowlandson crossed the Channel with his friend and patron, Matthew Mitchell, on a Dutch packet-boat en route to a sketching tour in the Lowlands and Germany. The inscription on the sail identifies the ship as The Dolphin Packet, a mail-carrying ferry that ran between the east coast of England and the Netherlands. The boat and Captain Flynn were captured by a Dutch privateer during the 4th Anglo-Dutch War in 1781-84. This incident was referenced in 1791 by John Adams, one of the American Founding Fathers, in a letter to Thomas Barclay, an American diplomat.
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