Arthur Victor Gregory

Arthur Victor Gregory (1867-1957) was perhaps the most prolific portraitist of Australian shipping, producing great numbers of paintings for more than 50 years. His father, George Frederick Gregory, established a marine painting business in Melbourne in the 1850s, in which Gregory's elder half-brother George Frederick Junior also worked. They made numerous photographic reproductions of their ship portraits, selling the originals to captains or owners, and the photographs to the crews.

AV Gregory inherited the business on the death of his father in 1890 and continued to paint until World War II, when he stopped for wartime security reasons. He kept all his working sketches so he could repeat earlier paintings and make more copies of the same ship. His carefully detailed portraits of every kind of vessel seen on Port Phillip Bay created a body of work regarded as a valuable record of the maritime traffic of that port, and indeed of Australian shipping for the period.

Gregory worked mainly in watercolour, rarely in oils. He was a master of his genre, and hence necessarily limited in stylistic development. He painted the contemporary and everyday, rather than the retrospective and nostalgic. The market for his work was largely the people who knew the ships and required accurate detail. Although there is a strong pot­boiler element in many of his works, and his seas and skies have been described as over dramatised his paintings have a reliable quality and a recognisable character.