Artware Fineart has dated this piece to the 19th Century.
Immigrants bellow deck on their passage to North America
oil on canvas
16 x 24 in. (41 x 61 cm.)
The overhead clearance seems rather high and its clear that the space in the hold in which accomodation levels have been built, which we know is what happened on ships running to the NE American seaboard including Canada: they were really in the timber (pine) importing trade and emigrants so accomodated made a profitable outward cargo.
The move towards large-scale scientific farming greatly increased output but made many agricultural workers redundant. Some moved to the fast-growing industrial areas in search of work, whereas others decided to emigrate to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and the United States. After 1830 the numbers of people leaving Britain increased dramatically. This was particularly true of those farmers and labourers who had lived in counties that had been hardest hit by the agricultural depression such as Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Dorset, Cornwall, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Cheshire and Cumberland.Liverpool now became the most popular emigrant port in Europe. In 1830 around 15,000 people sailed from this port to North America. By 1842 this had reached 200,000, which accounted for more than a half of all emigrants leaving from Europe.Unlike other groups of emigrants such as the Irish and Italians, a large number of the English people who went to America stayed in agriculture.The United States also attracted people from England with technological skills. Samuel Slater, who had learnt his trade under Jerediah Strutt and Richard Arkwright, pioneers of the revolution in textile machinery, arrived in the United States in 1789. Four years later Slater established America's first cotton factory at Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Immigrants with the skills developed in the English textile industry tended to settle in mill towns in Massachusetts such as Fall River, New Bedford and Lawrence. Established by a group of capitalists in Boston in 1845, Lawrence was especially popular with the English. One visitor noted that so many of the manager, loom-fixers, wool-sorters, shopkeepers and saloon owners spoke with a Yorkshire accent that he felt he was still in England. By 1860 one-third of Lawrence's 18,000 inhabitants were employed in the textile industry and the town had become known as the "Bradford of America". In October 1845 a serious blight began among the Irish potatoes, ruining about three-quarters of the country's crop. This was a disaster as over four million people in Ireland depended on the potato as their chief food. The blight returned in 1846 and over the next year an estimated 350,000 people died of starvation and an outbreak of typhus that ravaged a weaken population. Despite good potato crops over the next four years, people continued to die and in 1851 the Census Commissioners estimated that nearly a million people had died during the Irish Famine. The British administration and absentee landlords were blamed for this catastrophe by the Irish people.
Artware Fineart has dated this piece to the 19th Century.
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English School 19th Century, Immigrants Bellow Deck on Their Passage to North America.
