This is an extremely well done narrative ship portrait by one of the more elusive American marine painters, Joseph B. Smith. The schooner AURELIA P. HOWE, named after the daughter of a Manhattan business family, launched in 1845 out of Baltimore, Maryland and worked in the Chesapeake and Atlantic coastwise trade. Shown in her early glory, the schooner would be part of a legal battle in 1858, disappearing from the news to surface for Civil War charter service.