A fine and very rare piece: this is an eighteenth-century sectional elevation of a French ship, probably for construction purposes and perhaps a design and estimate for a specific vessel.

A fine and very rare piece: this is an eighteenth-century sectional elevation of a French ship, probably for construction purposes and perhaps a design and estimate for a specific vessel.

The drawing has been inspected by Contre-Amiral François Bellec (former director of the Musée de la Marine, Paris, and author of Unknown Lands: The Log Book of the Great Explorers, Tragédies De La Mer: Les Mythes De L'histoire, Le livre de L'aventure Maritime, Océans des hommes, and La Mer sous le regard des peintres de la marine). Admiral Bellec was impressed by the piece, dated it to the middle of the eighteenth century, and said that he was not aware of more than a few similar pieces in French institutional collections. He speculated that such pieces were ephemeral by their nature (once the ship was built there was little purpose in retaining the working drawings which would have been regarded as redundant).

The fact that the ship is flying different and apparently contradictory flags may indicate that it was a generic rather than a specific drawing: however the flags may possibly be unfamiliar examples of, for example, a set of Dutch provinces or a similar group of small states.