Pick of the week

The New Year will hardly have arrived before the first fair takes place—the Cotswold, with about 40 dealers at Westonbirt School near Tetbury, from January 4 to 6. There will be paintings, antiques, jewellery and decorative items at prices ranging from less than £20 to more than £20,000.

Among the paintings will be a 4ft by 5ft 7in canvas by the marine and landscape painter Arthur Wilde Parsons (1854– 1931) offered at £12,500 by Brian Ashbee and Wesley Wotruba of Bristol. The scene (above), with the hulk of HMS Daedalus moored in Bristol Docks, is peaceful enough, although, in her active career, the ship’s name had been known around the globe and it is still familiar to cryptozoologists and Fortean theorists.

On August 6, 1848, in the South Atlantic between Namibia and St Helena, Capt Peter M’quhae and his crew closely observed what they described as ‘an enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea’ and measuring, they guessed, at least 60ft long.

Reports and images in The Times and the Illustrated London News provoked a debate that continues today. The cartoonist Richard Doyle took up the sea-serpent motif, most tellingly as a snakey Liberty circling a lifeboat full of 1848’s dethroned monarchs. The most recent theory is that it was no serpent, but a sei whale, which sometimes feeds on the surface.

Arthur Parsons’s middle name is due to the fact that his uncle was the Rev Ralph Wilde, the Church of Ireland rector who baptised his more famous nephew, Oscar. He also adopted the poet’s illegitimate half-sisters, who died tragically aged 24 and 22 when their dresses caught fire at an 1871 Halloween dance in Co Monaghan. This is surely an indication that Halloween is not only an import from America, but rather a reimport, having Celtic origins.