Unsigned watercolor depicting the port-broadside view of an unidentified whaleship with two small schooners astern.
The text accompanying this watercolor in a pamphlet of Russell watercolors by the collector Allan Forbes:
"Many writers have liked to mention the King of the Seas, and one author, Milton, described one in these lines:
`Here leviathan, / Hugest of living creatures, on the deep / Stretched like a promontory, sleeps or swims / And seems a moving land; and at his gills, / Draws in, and at his trunk, spouts out a sea.'"
See Allan Forbes, Whale Ships and Whaling Scenes as Portrayed by Benjamin Russell. Presenting Reproductions in Color of the Paintings of the Foremost Artist in That Field (Boston: Printed for the Second Bank-State Street Trust Co, 1955), 67.
