(Updated, 12 Feb 2021) HMS ‘Goldfinch’ was a Redbreast-class Royal Naval gunboat (one of nine) of 805 tons and 165 feet long, built at Sheerness Dockyard and launched on 18 May 1889. After early service on the Australian station it was converted at Sheerness into a survey vessel and recommissioned under Commander (later Admiral Sir) Frederick Charles Learmonth in February 1902. From brief work in the Mediterranean until October, it then went to the West African coast but in 1903 was helping complete surveying the Newfoundland coast and waters east of the Strait of Belle-Ile. In this Learmonth was supporting and joined by Staff Commander William Tooker, who had been engaged on the re-survey of Labrador and the west coast of Newfoundland since 1891 (in the ‘Rambler’, under Commander H.E. Purey-Cust). How long this continued is unclear but Learmonth left ‘Goldfinch’ in mid-1905 and in 1906, when it returned to Sheerness for refit, its poor condition led to it being decommissioned and sold for breaking-up in May 1907. Learmonth (1866–1941), a notable surveyor, was Hydrographer of the Navy, 1919–24.

This painting, with what must be an iceberg in the right distance and either another or an icy shore at far left, clearly commemorates the Newfoundland survey. The artist, William Bloomfield Douglas (1822–1906) was briefly in the Navy but spent much of his fairly controversial early career in colonial service in Australia and the East Indies, including briefly in the Bombay Marine Service of the East India Company and commanding small vessels belonging to Rajah Sir James Brooke of Sarawak. On return to England he joined the Coastguard service, mainly at Southampton, though he also temporarily commanded the Revenue cutter 'Eagle' on the coast of Northumberland. He formally obtained a Master's ticket in 1859 based on his prior command experience and, although became an honorary lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve from 1866, his general later style of ‘Captain Bloomfield Douglas’ was mercantile rather than naval. Having had eight children, his first wife died in 1887, and in 1893 Douglas moved to Canada where he worked mainly at Halifax, N.S., for the Department of Marine and Fisheries, first in its tidal department and then as an examiner for masters and mates certificates. He remarried at Halifax in 1899 and died there in March 1906.

Although little is known of the extent of his artistic output and nothing of an exhibiting record, Douglas was a competent amateur painter in both watercolours and oil. An example of the former, showing HM brig 'Childers' in a Mediterranean squall in 1835, is reproduced in Sir Algernon West's memoir of Admiral Sir Harry Keppel: Douglas himself knew Keppel, having acted as a Malay interpreter for him in Keppel and Brooke's campaign against Borneo pirates in 1843. Signed ‘B. D. / 1903’, the 'Goldfinch' painting is the only oil by Douglas in a UK public collection and was either painted for Learmonth at Halfax, or at least obtained by him there and presented to the Museum on his death in 1941 with four others of the Bay of Naples by Antonio de Simone.This description is based on a public discussion of the painting on the Art UK website in January and February 2021. It identified a few other examples of Douglas's work, most notably two oils presented to the Dallas Museum of Art in 1931: one shows a ship off icebergs in 'Belle Isle Strait - Aug 1894', the other, titled 'A Close Shave', a ship narrowly avoiding rocks in a storm: both have notes and signatures by Douglas on the back identifying them as 'No. 7' and 'No. 15', painted in February and July 1896 (the latter taking '70 hours'). If this was his common practice, it may help identify others. An otherwise good entry on him in the ‘Australian Dictionary of Biography’ makes no mention of his art work.