The British Submarine K22 in Dry Dock at Rosyth
By Charles Pears, 1918
Massive and strange, the British submarine K22 sits high and dry on wooden blocks in this 1918 painting by Charles Pears. The setting is a dry dock at Rosyth, where the huge hull looms over a scattering of tiny workers who look almost ant-sized beside it. Pears wrapped the whole scene in a soft, misty light, so despite the subject being a war machine, the mood feels calm and even a little melancholy. Streaks of rusty orange run along the muted green and grey of the hull, and the vessel seems both mighty and weirdly fragile, hauled out of its natural element and laid bare for repairs.
Pears knew ships well. He served as an official war artist during the First World War and was a passionate sailor in his own right, which shows in the careful way he handled the vessel's shape and surface. The K-class submarines had a grim reputation among sailors, being fast but accident-prone, and K22 was caught up in a notorious wartime pileup known as the "Battle of May Island," when several of these subs crashed into each other in the darkness. Rather than showing any of that chaos, Pears chose a peaceful moment of maintenance, drawing our attention to the sheer scale of the machine and the quiet human labor needed to keep it running.
