Frederick Harnack

Reviewing Colin Larkin's Cover Me (scroll down if you've not seen it), I came across a couple of names that were new to me. One was as unknown to Colin, who mentions the rather bland cover for The Voyage of the Cap Pilar by Adrian Seligman, describing it as badly composed and poorly executed. He also mentions the unsigned board has a name on the back. F. Harnack.

This would be Frederick Bertrand Harnack, born in Manor Park, Essex, on 22 July 1897, the son of Ernest Henry Harnack (1868-1942), a doctor and pioneer of X-ray radiology, who later became incapacitated, and his wife Frances Elizabeth (Fanny) Harnack (1867-1936). Raised in the East End of London, the family (which included older siblings Edwin Percy [1893-1976] and Nellie Maud Mary [later Lussignea, 1894-1978]) lived in East Ham and Forest Gate before moving to West Mersea in 1922, where Frederick would live for the rest of his life.

He served with the London Rifle Brigade from June 1915 and subsequently transferred to the 5th Battalion City of London Regiment in August 1916. He was hospitalised in 1916 (with impetigo) and 1917 and was later wounded in action at Passchendale, although it was described as superficial. He returned to France in 1918 as a clerk with the Army Service Corps.

Harnack was fond of drawing and painting from an early age but received no formal training. In the early 1920s, he studied art and began providing black & white illustrations to several magazines and newspapers. Living at Mersea, he and his brother often hired boats to go sailing and he also sailed with Arthur Briscoe, a well-known marine artist and illustrator who became an influence on Harnack and his work. When his brother obtained a boat of his own, the Ben Gunn, the Harnacks became a familiar sight in Essex and Suffolk waters.

Harnack was a regular illustrator for Yachting Monthly in the late 1920s and in 1930 he sailed in the Finnish barque Alastor from the East India Dock to the Gulf of Bothaia, which provided more inspiration for his brush. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Harnack joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and was made a gunnery officer—ironic, given his revulsion towards guns since his service in the previous war—and served in the West of Scotland, where he was able to find time to paint in his spare time.

In 1942, in Colchester, he married Edna May Ewbank (1902-1993), who had been married to Frank D. Smith in 1926, but was living with the Harnack family as an unpaid domestic by 1939.

Lieutenant Harnack returned to Mersea in 1946 and exhibited at the Society of Marine Artists of which he became a member in 1950. Known locally as 'Fid', he lived at Greenwood, 84 High Street North, and continued to paint mostly marine subjects for over thirty years.

He died on 24 March 1983, at the age of 85, survived by his wife and a stepdaughter. His funeral took place at West Mersea Church on 5 April 1983.

Writing for a local paper, Hervey Benham wrote:

Fid ... spent a lifetime sailing around the creeks in his little yacht Ben Gunn, absorbing every nuance of the saltings and marshlands and interpeting them with rare skill and sensitivity in his water colours.
    He was a modest man, concerned more with creating works of art than with publicising them. Certainly he never received the popular acclaim or the financial rewards which he deserved and which he would probably have enjoyed had he been working today. Nevertheless his paintings are greatly loved and highly valued by many islanders and by still more visiting yachtsmen from all over the country and Harnack is treasured as a precious memento of Mersea. In particular that dazzling glare of sunshine on salt water which is so characteristic of the Blackwater and which appears so often in his pictures.