Charles J Lundgren (New York, Connecticut, 1911 - 1988) "H.M.S. Dreadnought" Signed lower right. Oil on Masonite. Provenance: Collection of James A. Helzer (1946-2008), Founder of Unicover Corporation. This painting is the original painting which was published on the Fleetwood Proofcard for the Great Britain Maritime stamps issued June 16, 1982. Lord John Arbuthnot Fisher, born in 1841 in Ceylon, was the son of a coffee planter so poor that he had to ship his seven children back to England to live on the charity of relatives. Many a youngster would have been blighted by such a fate, but it made Fisher a scrapper. "I had to fight ... for everything, and fighting made me what I am." In 1904, at age sixty-three, "Jacky" Fisher became Britain's First Sea Lord, and certainly one of the most innovative ever to serve in that position. Fisher's claim to a place in history is based on his brilliant invention of the H.M.S. Dreadnought, the world's first all big-gun, turbine-driven battleship, a vessel which, at a stroke, rendered all previous construction obsolete. Her fame rested on what she was: a ship so far advanced when she was commissioned in 1906 that every battleship that came after her embodied her basic concept. The Dreadnought's great breakthrough was the mounting of ten heavy twelve-inch guns on a single ship. Each of her enormous turrets weighed five-hundred tons; each gun exceeded the weight of the entire armament of Horatio Nelson's warship Victory, and each one of the big guns was capable of lobbing a terrifying 850 pound shell at an adversary twenty miles away with alarming accuracy. Indeed, the dawn of the twentieth century gave light to a totally new concept in battleship design ... Lord John Fisher's fearsome H.M.S. Dreadnought. Image Size: 18 x 21 in. Overall Size: 25 x 27 in. Unframed. (B06269)