1930s. At the same time, he hired well known artist Thomas C. Skinner and furnished him with a studio at the shipyard. Skinner turned out dozens of near-life-size canvases of shipwrights plying their trade—laying out patterns in cavernous lofts, punching holes for rivets, pouring molds with red-hot steel, lining up at pay windows at weeks’ end.
The shipyard also filmed those tradesmen, as an aid for training new workers, and those black and white films, recently restored, are now shown side-by-side with the paintings. A painting of workers laying out patterns, for instance, is echoed by similar filmed images. Scenes of workers pouring molten lead into a mold, bending white-hot steel strips into the shape of a prow, or turning a glowing propeller shaft are similarly juxtaposed. This may be, as museum curator Anna Holloway later told me, “the ultimate way of