English Sailor's Woolwork ("Woolie") of H.M.S. Aboukir, c. 1860

A finely worked sailor's woolwork picture depicting the Royal Navy ship of the line H.M.S. Aboukir under full sail, flying the White Ensign at her stern. The vessel is shown broadside, three masts dressed in canvas rendered in long wool stitches, with fine black thread standing rigging picked out over it. A pink-hulled foreshore, striped lighthouse, and banded sea in shifting tones of blue-green complete the scene. Above the ship, a curling ribbon banner in contrasting tan and black wool sweeps across the sky, inscribed "ABOUKIR" in appliquéd wool letters. The piece is presented in its original grain-painted wood frame with a slip.

The subject: H.M.S. Aboukir. 

Several Royal Navy ships carried the name Aboukir, commemorating Nelson's 1798 victory at the Battle of the Nile, fought in Egypt's Aboukir Bay. The ship portrayed here — full-rigged, flying the White Ensign, with gunports picked out along her sides — corresponds to the 90-gun second-rate ship of the line launched at Devonport Dockyard in 1848. She served with the Channel Squadron in the late 1850s and early 1860s before being converted to screw propulsion and later posted to Jamaica, where she ended her career as a receiving ship before being broken up in the late 1870s. A closely related woolwork of the same ship is held in the collection of the Royal Museums Greenwich, dated to circa 1859–61, when Aboukir sailed with the Channel Squadron — the benchmark used to date this piece to circa 1860.

About sailor's woolwork. 

"Woolies," as they're affectionately known, are a folk-art tradition unique to the age of sail. Made by seamen themselves — using leftover Berlin wool, sailcloth or ticking for a ground, and whatever needle a sailor could keep in his kit — they flourished from roughly the 1840s through the First World War. A sailor's daily maintenance of the ship's sails gave him the needle skills; long stretches off watch gave him the time. The best woolies rival oil paintings in their handling of light and rigging, though the names of almost all their makers have been lost — they were rarely signed, made instead as personal keepsakes, gifts for sweethearts and mothers, or mementos of a particular ship and voyage.

An unfinished secret on the verso. 

Beneath the woolwork's backing, the canvas bears an unfinished painting of a sailor and his sweetheart — a courting scene abandoned before the woolwork itself was stitched over it. It's a rare and poignant glimpse of a change of heart or change of plan more than a century ago, and it adds a layer of hidden history to an already personal object.