Oil painting of a swim-headed Thames barge sailing towards the viewer, towing a boat, with a similar ketch-rigged barge heading away in starboard quarter view to the right. Another sailing vessel off a low shore in the far left distance, and a plume of smoke from a steamer over the far horizon, suggest it is a view in the Thames estuary. It is signed 'E. Aubrey Hunt', lower right.

Hunt, a landscape and genre painter who also did good marine work, was one of an interesting group of American painters working in Europe in the late 19th-century, many influenced by the Impressionists. Born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, on 17 February 1855, he came to England quite early in life. He first lived in Ripley, Surrey, but then spent time in Tangier and France, before returning to London, and living successively in Blackheath, St Ives and finally Hastings, where he died on 22 November 1922. He exhibited very widely, including at the Paris Salon in 1888, at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists (of which he became a member in 1884) and the Grosvenor Galleries. [PvdM 2/09]