ART What lies beneath

Grace Darling by Thomas Musgrave Joy oil on canvas

McManus Galleries Dundee

CELEBRITIES come and go. Cleopatra was famous for bathing in asses’ milk; Shah Rukh Khan [who?] is the biggest movie star in the world; Kylie Jenner, 21, is the world’s youngest billionaire. Famous for their body, their talent, their intelligence, for how much lipstick they can sell… but sometimes a celebrity, like 19th-century Grace Darling, is known for good deeds.

At 3am on September 7, 1838, the SS Forfarshire, sailing from Hull to

Dundee, was shipwrecked. At first light, 23-year-old Grace spied the disaster, persuaded her reluctant father, the lighthouse keeper, to help, and they rowed, in treacherous conditions, to the wreck, rescued the nine survivors on board and were awarded various medals. Grace became a household name, the darling of the media.

Over a dozen artists, including Thomas Musgrave Joy, then in his midtwenties, were sent to paint her. Her face launched an industry; it appeared on cups and plates. Hundreds of letters arrived requesting her signature, a lock of hair, a piece of the garment she wore during the rescue. There were proposals of marriage; £700 was raised in gratitude. Queen Victoria sent her 50 quid, the Duke of Northumberland a silver teapot.

Ballads were written. Wordsworth wrote her a poem. They read about her in America, Australia, Japan. And her fame lives on. Michael Longley’s poem

Grace Darling, published in 1979, was set to music by Duke Special. There’s a Grace Darling chocolate bar.

She has her own website, and Hazel Gaynor’s recent novel The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter remembers Darling as a reluctant heroine, a reluctant celebrity, who lived with her parents and died of tuberculosis at 26.

Gaynor argues, in her novel’s postscript, that Grace, “an angel without wings”, with her pretty face “was perfectly placed to fulfil the desire among Victorian society for romance and heroines”, and Gaynor also wonders if fame hadn’t become a burden, if the stress and anxiety of being famous

“led to her physical weakening and, eventually, to consumption”.

When Thomas Musgrave Joy visited Grace Darling’s lighthouse he stayed several weeks and painted this portrait.

Born in 1812 in Boughton Hall, Monchelsea, Kent, where his father was the squire, his parents disapproved of his wanting to be an artist. Nevertheless he studied art and, aged

19, was exhibiting with the Royal Academy. Other works include a recreation of wreck of the Forfarshire, a portrait of the Prince of Wales and Queen Victoria’s dogs.

He died in 1866 and that same year his 18-year-old daughter exhibited her first painting at the RA. Her father approved.