Page 174 - Bulletin 9 2005

161

Lawrence Green, in a profile of Pilkington in the Cape Argus of 15 October, 1949, has him
reminiscing: “I can still remember my early years at the desolate harbour of Port Nolloth.

Lovely barques came there from Swansea to load copper ore. Among the characters I
remember was a bearded, swash-buckling, beer-drinking Prussian - Herr Adolf Luderitz,

founder of Luderitz, before that called Angra Pequena.”

He took the view (again in the Green interview) that “no one can teach sea painting anyway

- there is nothing static about the sea, and the light never remains the same for long. A
marine painter must have an affinity with the sea, he must have sailed boats himself and

made voyages.” One critic once remarked that his youthful impressions at Port Nolloth
greatly influenced his work and, more particularly, the more robust of his works with tugs

battling with barges in heavy seas and smoke flattened by the wind.

It is indeed as a marine artist that George Pilkington is and will be remembered. His

strength, in my view and, it seems, in the view of some far better qualified critics, lay in his

ability to paint boats and ships that floated and moved in a seaway, and seas and surf that
broke and curled as they should. He has been compared to the English artist, Frank Mason.

Mason was probably better known internationally than Pilkington and he specialised in
tramps and tankers pounding through heavy seas with rust marks revealing their age and

hard work. The two definitely corresponded and, I think, met and knew each other quite
well. My evidence here is a painting by Mason entitled “Winter North Atlantic”, after the

marking on the Plimsoll Line that indicates the depth to which a ship may be loaded in

various parts of the world, and at various times of the seasons. A print of this, which I
found in my father’s office after his death, is endorsed by the artist to Pilkington, indicating

some kind of reasonably close relationship.

His reputation and popularity as a painter grew and grew - his subjects were and remained
ships, docks, fishing boats, the sea, and the rocks. In 1936 he achieved the pinnacle of