If the ship models peddled on the Internet are considered “world-class” and “museum quality” – many of them produced in offshore sweatshops – where is one to find superlatives sufficient for the work of Rob Napier? One is tempted to claim his ship models amount to sorcery, a rough magic concocted from historical research, computer science, photography, woodworking, engineering and draftsmanship.
Napier in his workshop. Photo by Lara Woolfson.
Rob’s workshop – a converted garage behind his house in Newburyport – has served as shipyard and dry dock to fleets of Lilliputian vessels. While the space houses conventional tools, there is also an elfin lathe for turning small brass cannon, and a matchbox-sized table saw with a blade about twice the diameter of a bottle cap.
The process itself seems almost mundane. Rob at work is a guy in a blue cotton shirt and jeans, pausing to scratch his beard, cutting blocks of wood into ever-smaller pieces, sanding deadeyes, and watching paint dry. The pace is glacial. I remember him fitting dozens of miniscule maple deck planks onto the William H. Conner, a six-foot-long model of an 1871 Downeaster. The following week he shook his head, ripped them all out, and started over, this time with ebony.
In 1959, when Rob was 13, he came under the spell of the ship model collection in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In the nearly 50 years since, he has built over 800 himself, everything from half hulls of catboats and kayaks to fully rigged masterpieces.
One of my favorites – a pair of boats actually – nests under a glass bell in his workshop. The larger vessel represents a kind of boxy scow that worked off our shores over a century ago – hauling sand off Plum Island or pounding in fish weirs. The smaller vessel is a skiff tethered to the scow by a gossamer thread. The pair, small enough to fit in your palm, floats on brass pins as if suspended in water so clear it has disappeared.
“The effort put into the line is important,” he notes. “That’s the one part of a ship where you actually put your hands.”
Our childlike fascination with the miniature only partly accounts for a ship model’s appeal. There is also a deeper, almost atavistic, response. A yearning to dream.
“The power of model ships comes from the fact that they antedate other models of ‘things that go’ by millennia,” he says. “They were used in spiritual ways. You put a ship in a tomb, not as a ship, but to convey the dead to the underworld. You put a ship in a church, and it guaranteed a sailor’s safe return or expressed gratitude for his safe return.”
A finished model by Napier makes for an impressive sight. Photo courtesy Rob Napier.
In 18th-century England, “dockyard” models began to tell “a technical story.” They soon evolved into the Power Point presentations of their day and began finding homes in private collections. Though museums often describe them as “decorative art,” Rob prefers “hyper-representational multimedia sculpture.”
His commissions arrive through many doors. “Clients appear with an idea – they don’t just come in and say, ‘dazzle me.’ One wanted a boat with a Dutch flag. That narrowed it to about a million boats, but we went from there.”The Conner had family roots. Others want a likeness of a ship they sailed or served upon. “Yachtsmen,” he says, “love their boats. A yachtsman would have his boat in the living room if his wife would let him. But since she won’t, he’ll settle for a model.”
In 1983 when a client expressed interest in a model of Flying Cloud, an overdone icon, Rob suggested Sooloo II, an all but forgotten ship launched in Salem in 1861. Though he describes Sooloo as “a sailing boxcar,” he distilled the essence of her utilitarian bulk into a fragile, almost ephemeral object assembled from over 20,000 handmade parts.
“Fabrication loses a lot of its luster after you’ve been at it a while,” he confesses – tweezers and jeweler’s tools are only part of the story. Accurately recreating a ship that no longer exists is a forensic exercise that may include consulting half hulls, old photos, paintings, logs and letters.
Unlike sorcerers, ship model builders are unlikely to find apprenticeships. Rob has met many of his anonymous and long-dead teachers repairing and maintaining venerable antiques including models in the New York Yacht Club collection and Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, as well as the Newburyport Customs House and the Addison Gallery.
Thirty years after his initial visit to the MFA, the museum called on him to restore one of his childhood inspirations: the Dutch East Indiaman, Valkenisse. A trip to the Netherlands, 500 emails and letters, and several years later, the five-foot-long, 291-year-old model returned to the museum cleaned, repaired, and re-rigged. Rob gives an account of this adventure in a lavishly illustrated book, Reconditioning an Eighteenth-Century Ship Model, Valkenisse, Retourschip of 1717, published by SeaWatch Books.
Another flashy patient, Princess Royal, a 1773 dockyard model owned by the U.S. Naval Academy, arrived on his doorstep after a visit to a hospital’s radiology department diagnosed her with acute glue failure. Princess Royal represented the British Empire at its height: a lady festooned with Neptunes and Naiads forward, diminutive glass panes aft, and thousands of little sticks of wood between.
“Too many pieces,” Rob mutters under his breath, “too many damned pieces.”
Rob Napier: Master Boat Builder – March / April 2009
If the ship models peddled on the Internet are considered “world-class” and “museum quality” – many of them produced in offshore sweatshops – where is one to find superlatives sufficient for the work of Rob Napier? One is tempted to claim his ship models amount to sorcery, a rough magic concocted from historical research, computer science, photography, woodworking, engineering and draftsmanship.
Napier in his workshop. Photo by Lara Woolfson.
Rob’s workshop – a converted garage behind his house in Newburyport – has served as shipyard and dry dock to fleets of Lilliputian vessels. While the space houses conventional tools, there is also an elfin lathe for turning small brass cannon, and a matchbox-sized table saw with a blade about twice the diameter of a bottle cap.
The process itself seems almost mundane. Rob at work is a guy in a blue cotton shirt and jeans, pausing to scratch his beard, cutting blocks of wood into ever-smaller pieces, sanding deadeyes, and watching paint dry. The pace is glacial. I remember him fitting dozens of miniscule maple deck planks onto the William H. Conner, a six-foot-long model of an 1871 Downeaster. The following week he shook his head, ripped them all out, and started over, this time with ebony.
In 1959, when Rob was 13, he came under the spell of the ship model collection in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In the nearly 50 years since, he has built over 800 himself, everything from half hulls of catboats and kayaks to fully rigged masterpieces.
One of my favorites – a pair of boats actually – nests under a glass bell in his workshop. The larger vessel represents a kind of boxy scow that worked off our shores over a century ago – hauling sand off Plum Island or pounding in fish weirs. The smaller vessel is a skiff tethered to the scow by a gossamer thread. The pair, small enough to fit in your palm, floats on brass pins as if suspended in water so clear it has disappeared.
“The effort put into the line is important,” he notes. “That’s the one part of a ship where you actually put your hands.”
Our childlike fascination with the miniature only partly accounts for a ship model’s appeal. There is also a deeper, almost atavistic, response. A yearning to dream.
“The power of model ships comes from the fact that they antedate other models of ‘things that go’ by millennia,” he says. “They were used in spiritual ways. You put a ship in a tomb, not as a ship, but to convey the dead to the underworld. You put a ship in a church, and it guaranteed a sailor’s safe return or expressed gratitude for his safe return.”
A finished model by Napier makes for an impressive sight. Photo courtesy Rob Napier.
In 18th-century England, “dockyard” models began to tell “a technical story.” They soon evolved into the Power Point presentations of their day and began finding homes in private collections. Though museums often describe them as “decorative art,” Rob prefers “hyper-representational multimedia sculpture.”
His commissions arrive through many doors. “Clients appear with an idea – they don’t just come in and say, ‘dazzle me.’ One wanted a boat with a Dutch flag. That narrowed it to about a million boats, but we went from there.”The Conner had family roots. Others want a likeness of a ship they sailed or served upon. “Yachtsmen,” he says, “love their boats. A yachtsman would have his boat in the living room if his wife would let him. But since she won’t, he’ll settle for a model.”
In 1983 when a client expressed interest in a model of Flying Cloud, an overdone icon, Rob suggested Sooloo II, an all but forgotten ship launched in Salem in 1861. Though he describes Sooloo as “a sailing boxcar,” he distilled the essence of her utilitarian bulk into a fragile, almost ephemeral object assembled from over 20,000 handmade parts.
“Fabrication loses a lot of its luster after you’ve been at it a while,” he confesses – tweezers and jeweler’s tools are only part of the story. Accurately recreating a ship that no longer exists is a forensic exercise that may include consulting half hulls, old photos, paintings, logs and letters.
Unlike sorcerers, ship model builders are unlikely to find apprenticeships. Rob has met many of his anonymous and long-dead teachers repairing and maintaining venerable antiques including models in the New York Yacht Club collection and Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, as well as the Newburyport Customs House and the Addison Gallery.
Thirty years after his initial visit to the MFA, the museum called on him to restore one of his childhood inspirations: the Dutch East Indiaman, Valkenisse. A trip to the Netherlands, 500 emails and letters, and several years later, the five-foot-long, 291-year-old model returned to the museum cleaned, repaired, and re-rigged. Rob gives an account of this adventure in a lavishly illustrated book, Reconditioning an Eighteenth-Century Ship Model, Valkenisse, Retourschip of 1717, published by SeaWatch Books.
Another flashy patient, Princess Royal, a 1773 dockyard model owned by the U.S. Naval Academy, arrived on his doorstep after a visit to a hospital’s radiology department diagnosed her with acute glue failure. Princess Royal represented the British Empire at its height: a lady festooned with Neptunes and Naiads forward, diminutive glass panes aft, and thousands of little sticks of wood between.
“Too many pieces,” Rob mutters under his breath, “too many damned pieces.”