This is a hand-coloured lithograph of the merchant ship ‘Lady Bulwer’, which was one of the Black Ball Line fleet owned by James Baines of Liverpool. Captain T. Tobin appears to have been her first commander and his name appears in ‘Lloyds Register’ until late 1858. The ship herself is no longer recorded in the 1860 ‘Lloyds Register’. In all the ‘Registers’ in which she appears, she is listed as sailing between Liverpool and New Orleans. The artist has depicted her at anchor in a calm sea, her sails luffed and a thin plume of smoke issuing from her funnel. Thomas Dove worked in his early years in the studio of George Chambers Senior (1803-1840). Much of his later work shows shipping on the Mersey. In his extreme old age he became impoverished and died in the workhouse in Whitby.