A port broadside view of the 'Clytie' off an as yet unidentified and probably British coastline, probably comprising a deep bay or inlet, with a lighthouse on the high ground at right set in a walled enclosure. The ship flies a house flag at her mainmast comprising a white saltire cross on a red ground with a red 'S' in a white roundel at centre. This is the flag of Robert Simpson of Whitehaven for whom 'Clytie' was built by in 1893 the Ailsa Shipbuilding Co., of Troon. It was registered in Whitehaven in the same year. At the fore it is wearing a name pennant and at the mizzen, below the red ensign, the four flags ‘M.W.K.J.’ of its identification hoist in the 'Commercial Code of Signals' then in force. It may have been the only ship ever owned by Robert Simpson (not to be confused either with the sailing-ship owners Simpson Brothers of Swansea or with R. & D. Simpson of Leith, who traded to Iceland in the 1880s and ‘90s): no other owned by him has yet been identified. If so, this may account for his being sufficiently proud of it both to have commissioned this portrait and to have registered his house-flag with Lloyd's of London for inclusion in their ‘Book of House Flags & Funnels’ of 1904 (though it does not appear in the second and final edition of 1912).

We are grateful to Michael Charles for supplying notes on the ship and identifying the artist, based on other examples, as Robert P. Atkinson. Nothing further is yet known of him except that he appears to have lived and worked somewhere in the Merseyside/North Wales area and to have confined his subject matter to the workaday steam coasters which frequented the Irish Sea in his time.